K-Punk: September 2004 Archives

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SEPTEMBER 29, 2004

WHY I AM SO FUCKED UP...
OK, most difficult post yet, but here goes....
I was sexually abused by a doctor when I was in my early

twenties. It was just after I had been released from
psychiatric hospital after my first nervous breakdown and
put it into his care for clinical depression. To spare my
own embarrassment, I won't go into the details of it, but
suffice it to say, I was one of many young males that this
doctor ab/used. Actually, his treatment of me was really
quite trivial compared to what he did to others. His
manipulations and his pretexts for filming the naked
bodies of some of his victims in some cases involved
telling young men that they were infertile when there was
nothing wrong with them.
This same doctor had treated me for anxiety when I was 14

and had made it clear to me that my problems were due to
one reason alone: sex. If I had got a girlfriend, all my
difficulties would dissolve. :-)
In any case, he is now in jail. The case received a great

deal of press attention. Last I heard, his tragic wife,
convinced of his innocence, was campaigning to clear his
name.
Now, don't be too ready to comfort yourselves, sexualists.

Ah, that's why he is so anti-sex... because he was
abused...'
Not at all. On the contrary, this episode helped me to see

that it is not my aversion to sex that is 'sick', it is
sex itself that is pathological.
Sex IS abuse. And if you think this is just one of my

wacky theoretical reversals, at least pause to reflect on
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k-punk: September 2004 Archives http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/2004_09.html
the fact that I have support from the most unexpected,

most 'rational' source on this: Kant.
Kant believed that sex inevitably entailed treating the

other person as a means to an end. Since this was contrary
to one of his formulations of moral duty - the idea that
we should treat people as an end in themselves, never as
means to an end - he was in a quandary when it came to
sex, which he rightly thought of as inherently
pathological. The only way that he could get round this -
he couldn't very well declare leave it at that, saying sex
to be intrinsically wrong - was to evoke the marriage
contract. Sex is only valid within marriage, Kant argued,
because within marriage we have contracted out our organs
for the use of the spouse, just as they have done the same
for us, and so the categorical imperative can be
suspended.
Kant's view is much closer to the truth IMHO than those

who maintain that sex is 'healthy'.
I actually don't regard the abuse episode as that serious,

except that it gave me an insight into the inherently
abusive nature of both sex and authority.
No doubt middle class people will be nonplussed by my

compliance with the doctor's wishes. Why did you go along
with what he said? Well, they simply do not understand the
degree of working class trust in and deference to
bourgeois authority. It's difficult for us to believe that
something a m/c professional is telling us is not true. We
are naive enough to believe in the probity of their
institutions.
Obviously this doctor ultimately did me a favour my

removing such faith from me.
It's interesting that one of the original meaning of the

word 'punk' was the male subjected to sodomy in jail. Iggy
Pop was famously raped by bikers (cf 'Dirt' from
Funhouse), but the most coldly pitiless observer of the
sex/power abuse virus is undoubtedly Swans' Mike Gira, who
was also raped whilst a young man. The Swans' releases
'Cop', 'Raping a Slave', 'Greed' and 'Holy Money' are
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hyper-cold diagrams of an economic-social humiliation

machine:
'Keep your head on the ground. Push your ass up. Move
around. Cry. Open your mouth. Here is your money. This
feels good.' ('A Screw (Holy Money)'
'I give you money. You're superior. I don't exist. You

control me. You're corrupt. You deform me. You own me.'
('Your Property')
The genius of Gira was to deny that there was anything

extreme about these scenarios or descriptions. Rather than
embittering or psychopathologizing him, his rape had
politicized him, giving him a terrifying lucid insight
into the idiotic evil of the male sex drive.
Posted by mark at 11:00 PM | TrackBack
YOU'VE GOT ME GIRL ON THE RUNAROUND
In the best possible way, I couldn't disagree more with

John.
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To say that Courtly Love is a version of the master-slave

dialectic is getting it the wrong way round. Given that
the Courtly Love machine emerged in the middle ages, it
would be more accurate to say that Hegel's m-s dialectic
is a garbled version of it. Historically speaking, there
is no question that the modern notion of romantic love is
a degraded version of Courtly Love. One of the most
successful Courtly Love narratives was the roman de la
rose (romance of the rose), and it is interesting that the
word 'romance' originally meant "story of a hero's
adventures," and "verse narrative," and only much later
became solely associated with interiorised couple-passion.
Courtly Love was entirely on the surface, about what Lacan
calls ex-timacy, not the shared interiority of the modern
domestic couple's 'four-eyed despotic machine.'
Besides, it's odd to invoke Bataille in opposition to

Hegel. Much of Bataille's work was a reworking of Hegel's
darkly pompous mystagoguery. But even that complicity with
the Absolute Enemy is not the most troubling aspect of
Bataille's (non) project. It is precisely his resolutely
non-perverse, Catholic notion of perversion that is the
problem.
Before I elaborate on that claim, a brief note on

Catholicism. The problem with Catholicism is not excessive
guilt. On the contrary, Catholics should be more guilty...
for the Spanish Inquisition... for Bishop Landa burning
most of Mayan culture in an afternoon... for
systematically exploiting the poorest and most
disenfranchised of the earth over two millennia and for
encouraging them to breed indiscriminately (no-one mention
Liberation Theology, please: that's only positive to the
degree that it is Marxist, i.e. anti-Catholic)... for what
Bergmann correctly identifies as its necessary, not
accidental relationship to child abuse... 'Bergmann, ...,
claimed that "the only rational view of the Roman Catholic
Church" was that it was "a monstrous blasphemy of
transcendent evil: incomparably more corrupt than the
Mafia (if indeed it can be separated from organised crime,
which of course it cannot)". His views, he said, were
backed up by "hard sociological data which even they can't
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suppress now" concerning the – apparently endemic –

problem of institutionalised child abuse amongst Catholic
clergy. But Bergmann alienated any of the few supporters
he had even within Protestantism by adding that "any
religion that is serious about worshipping the Father-God
will always be about child abuse; the only difference
between the religion of the Paulites and that of the
Abrahamites is that, in the Paulites' case, child torture
spills over into child murder. Despite tying and binding
Isaac, the Jewish God ultimately spares Abraham's son; but
the Paulite God actually kills his own son."'
So, yes Catholics should be more guilty... not in that

ooo, it is awful (so I'll do it) sense... but coldly
guilty... so guilty in fact that they cease to be
Catholics and really repent of their sins.
Bataille is as much a part of the despicable Catholic

psychology of guilt and transgression as any other victims
of this evil cult (you think I'm exaggerating? Tell me an
institution that has done more evil on the planet? Nazism
only lasted 10 years or so, whereas Catholicism is a
still-existing, still-abusing two-thousand year reich).
Everyone knows (but some continue to celebrate) that the
deep sickness of Catholicism is that guilt ethically
legitimates and pyschologically predisposes its victim-
abusers towards destruction of others and self-
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destruction. Zizek has drawn our attention to Paul's

observation that law produces (the desire for)
transgression. The critique of this move is so well
rehearsed that it scarcely seems worthwhile repeating it
here. But suffice it to say that more or less the whole of
Foucault and everything that is innovative about Lacan,
Deleuze-Guattari and Burroughs is specifically designed to
reduce that aren't we naughty transgresso-pantomimery to
the interiorised, oedi-policed mummery that it is. And,
needless to say, Spinoza could not have been less
transgressive, less interested in urinating over the head
of a priest to show how Bad he was. (Look at me, punish
me... gaahhhhhhhhhh!)
'The whole Courtly Love/ Glamasochism thing stinks of a

project with an infinitely deferred goal: "the act itself
is unimportant/ boring". No. Far from it. Only in the
climax-orientated, semen-drenched male libidinal economy
which Bataille, far from escaping, produces yet another,
academically titillating version of, is it is possible to
defer goals. Nothing is deferred in Courtly Love, there is
an almost unbearable plenitude, so that a breath, a sigh
and a caress are enough to make your whole body shiver
with intensely distributed libidinal charge. Nothing is
deferred; what is positively avoided is anything that will
terminate the plateau. Surely it's uncontoversial to note
that the whole of, for instance, the Body without Organs
plateau in ATP is about, not deferral, but a model of
diffuse eroticism which can include sex and even orgasm,
but which is not terminated by them. Deleuze-Guattari
rightly take great pains to say that sex and even male
emission phenomena need not end the plateau.
What then is this 'Act' of which the Sadeans (John and

Glueboot) insist on maintaining the primacy? Only a Sadean
sexualist (or a LLAD) could make a distinction between The
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Act and eroticism; for the Masochist, the distinction is

meaningless; all gestures, all gameplay, is as fully
erotic as any rutting. And that's because, though they
will deny it, the Sadeans continue to have a model that is
BOTH semiotically overcoded AND biologisitic. Semiotically
overcoded because it privileges certain behaviours and
activities as key signifiers ('we're having sex now, this
is REALLY it, not foreplay....' and, conversely, 'it's
over now, I feel disgusted, let's do it again....' There
is no 'doing it again' for a Masochist (when did it stop?)
Incidentally, when sexualists say 'they had sex five times
last night' what is 'sex'?) Biologistic because, for all
the mystificatory vagueness about what the Act involves,
it is pretty clear that is sex understood in an absolutely
straightforward way. And as I said before, the fact that
this moves beyond genital copulation to orgasm doesn't
mean anything. As Nina rightly says, there is nothing
natural, but nevertheless there are biotic defaults, and
there is nothing more biologistic than poking bits of
yourself into holes or rubbing bits of yourself until they
are sick. Look at dogs -- they'll fuck anything, any
surface, any animal, any orifice will do. Are they
'perverse'? On the contrary, in their agitational drive to
relieve tension by any means necessary one can see the
whole Schopenhauerian torture chamber that is organic
biotics absolutely exposed for what it is. Insofar as
there is nature, insofar as there is biology, it is
Sadean-Bataillean. I expect John and Siobhan will deny
that this is what they mean by sex, but I suspect, and I
could of course be wrong, that their defintion of sex is
no more positive than the Trad Christian definition of the
soul, i.e. it will proceed by negation, 'it's not x, it's
not y': what is it then?
It it is precisely this drive to relieve tension -

inevitably producing tristresse and therefore the need to
relieve tension again and therefore etc... - that is what
Masochism evades in its construction of a cold rationalist
nu-earth hypersensuality. Unlike the pleasure principle
drive to have done with tension, Masochism is literally
in-tense, in that it takes its enjoyment from modulating
tension.
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So I would say that Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte are

much more erotic than the Bataille-feted Emily Bronte.
Wuthering Heights' orgiastic excess (calm down, jeez, with
this amount of hot blood you could end up like D H
Lawrence, a fate worse than life) and Bad Idealized Bad
Unattainable lover feeds straight into Mills and Boon and
Sex and the City (this latter surely the final argument
against sex retaining any subversive potential whatsoever:
what could be more depressingly normalising?) And it's not
only me that finds Bataille's porn novels, like Sade's,
dis-spiritingly and unreadably tedious. At least
Burroughs' Nova Trilogy, with its obsessive fixation on
the Garden of Earthly Delights mechanical sex repetition,
was about the way that sex was a boring treadmill.
Note also that Courtly Love does not involve 'worship of

one partner by a robot'. It is the femachine Ladytron that
is worshipped, at least in the first instance. But this is
only the first phase of the game; there are infinite other
cyberotic combinations possible.
Also, there is no need for glamasochism to share the

disastrous focus on the Couple. In any case, the
masochistic couple is already part of a cybernetic
assemblage (indeed it is this extimate desiring-machine
that makes possible their coupling in the first place).
But what could be less perverse, more militantly normal,
than the idea of 'the intimate couple against the world'
that John invokes? As Zizek rightly points out, drawing
upon Duras, the only positive model for the couple is not
two people looking into one another's eyes, but both
looking outwards to a Cause to which they have both
pledged alliegance.
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Posted by mark at 07:20 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
SEPTEMBER 28, 2004

YOU TEND TO GET BURNED, YOU TEND TO GET
BRUISED
I've been bitten so many times, but - I wear my heart on
my sleeve, don't count the cost - so it's with caution,
but real heartfelt gladness, that I say, welome back.
Posted by mark at 02:17 AM | TrackBack
UNMASK! UNMASK!
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The answer to John effay's typically stimulating response

to my post on Courtly Love will have to wait until
tomorrow, because I have spent all evening completing this
post on Eyes Wide Shut over at Hyperstition. Of course,
the post is, I hope, far from irrelevant to current
discussions hereabouts.
SEPTEMBER 26, 2004

THE MIRACLE OF LOVE, THE ANSWER OF THE REAL
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In answer to those who think that Glamasochism makes

impossible demands of women, I would recommend Zizek's
wonderful 'Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing' from
Metastases of Enjoyment. (Acquired for TWO QUID while out
with Infinite Thought and Alberto yesterday --- only in
Stoke Newington could you find Slavoj in a charity shop
for £2!)
It is not that I or other advocates of Glamasochists have

'made up' the Idealization of Woman. Such Idealization is
presupposed in any erotic love relation - which, as Lacan
insists, can never be a relationship between persons, in
part because only in the minds of Teenage Ontologists and
Guardian Women's Page readers are there 'real persons'.
What erotic love entails is the two roles of the
capricious and cold Ladytron ('a machine which utters
meaningless desires as random') and the servant-bondsman-
Knight. These are roles, or rather, machinic functions,
and as Zizek's example of The Crying Game, or my examples
of Amanda Lear on the cover of Roxy's For Your Pleasure
and Balzac's Sarrazine make clear, there is no question of
biological essentialism here: men, women, heterosexual or
homosexual, can play the function of either Lady or
Knight. And play them they must if the game of love is to
begin.
(A brief note here: yes, masochism is a perversion ---
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but, as Zizek rightly observes, it is the retrospectively

understood truth of Middle Ages Courtly Love, from which
all our notions of erotic - sometimes misleadingly called
'romantic' - love derive).
Paradoxically, in any case, the Ideal is the Real - the

unattainable limit, the Deleuze-Guattari Body without
Organs (and as Irigaray says in This Sex Which is Not One,
women have always been Bodeis withour Organs). It is this
Real which Lacan, following Freud, calls Das Ding, or the
Thing. I love you for what is in you more than yourself.
Again paradoxically, it is precisely when the Object
attains subjectivity that when the game moves over a
threshold into a desubjecifying machinic encounter and the
"miracle of love" occurs.
'From a capricious and ironic sovereign Lady, she changes

into the pathetic figure of a delicate, sensitive boy who
is desperately in love. It is at this point that true love
emerges, love as a metaphor in the Lacanian sense: we
witness the sublime moment when eromenos (the loved one)
changes into erastes (the loving one) by stretching out
her hand and "returning love". This moment designates the
"miracle" of love, the moment of the "answer of the Real";
as such, it perhaps enables us to grasp what Lacan has in
mind when he insists that the subject itself has the
status of an "answer of the Real". That is to say, up to
this reverse, the loved one has the status of the object:
he is loved on account of something that is "in him more
than himself" and that he is unaware of - I can never
answer the question 'what am I as an object for the other?
What does the other see in me that causes his love?' We
thus confront an assymetry, not only the assymetry between
subject and object, but in a far more radical sense of a
dischord between what the lover sees in the loved one and
what the loved one knows himself to be.
Here we find the inescapable deadlock that defines the

position of the loved one: the other sees something in and
me and wants something from me, but I cannot give him what
I do not possess - or, as Lacan puts it, there is no
relationship between what the loved one possesses and what
the loving one lacks. The only way for the loved one to
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escape this deadlock is to reach out his hand towards the

loving one and "return the love" - that is, to exchange in
a metaphorical gesture, his status as the loved one for
the status of the loving one. This reversal designates the
point of subjectivization: the object of love changes into
a subject the moment it answers the call of love. And it
is only by way of this reversal that a genuine love
emerges: I am truly in love not when I as simply
fascinated by the agalma in the other, but when I
experience the other, the object of love, as frail and
lost, as lacking "it", and my love none the less survives
the loss.
We must be especially attentive here so that we do not

miss the point of this reversal: although we now have two
loving subjects instead of the initial duality of the
loving one and the loved one, the asymmetry persists,
since it was the object itself that, as it were, confessed
to its lack by means of its subjectivization. Something
deeply embarrassing and truly scandalous abides in the
reversal by means of which the mysterious, fascinating,
elusive object of love discloses its deadlock, and thus
acquires the status of another subject.' (103-104)
The contemporary degraded and coarsely sexualized version

of erotic love has renaturalized and biologized this
miraculous moment as the time in which copulation happens.
But in Courly Love proper, sex can be part of the initial
phase of femachinic Master and attentive Servant. It need
not be the semiotic trigger for the threshold shift into
the miraculous encounter. No - the trigger is the moment
when the Master shows the Servant 'mercy'. Let's be clear
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that this is not the end of the game, the shedding of

masks and appearances to uncover the empirical subject
beneath them, or worse, the prelude to reproducer-
domesticated coupledom. Or at least it need not be. It can
be the start of an even more challenging, even more
complex and intense game, one that can last a lifetime at
least.
SEPTEMBER 22, 2004

BETTER RED THAN DEAD
No apologies for sharing some more words of wisdom from
Slavoj with y'all:
'What if we are "really alive" only and if we engage

ourselves with an excessive intensity that puts us beyond
"mere life"? What if, when we focus on mere survival, even
if it is qualified as "having a good time", what we
ultimately lose is life itself? What if the Palestinian
suicide bomber on the point of blowing himself (and
others) up is, in an emphatic sense, "more alive" than the
American soldier engaged in war in front of a computer
screen hundreds of miles away from the enemy, or a New
York yuppie jogging along the Hudson river in order to
keep his boyd in shape?
It is a properly Nietzschean paradox that the greatest

loser in [the] apparent assertion of Life against all
transcendent Causes is actual life itself. What makes life
"worth living" is the very excess of life: the awareness
that there is something to live for which we are ready to
risk our life (we may call this excess "freedom",
"honour", "dignity", "autonomy", etc.)
... The "postmetaphysical" survivalist stance of the Last

Men ends up in an anemic spectacle of life dragging on as
its own shadow. It is within this horizon that we should
appreciate today's growing rejection of the death penalty:
what we should be able to discern is the hidden
"biopolitics" which sustain this rejection. Those who
assert the "sacredness of life," defending it against the
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threat of transcendent powers which parasatize on it, end

up in a "supervized world in which we'll live painlessly,
safely - and tediously," a wolf in which, for the sake of
its very official goal - a long, pleasurable life - all
real pleausures are prohibited or strictly controlled
(smoking, drugs, food...)
The Puppet and the Dwarf, 94-95
SEPTEMBER 21, 2004

THE VERY PINNACLE OF DIMWITTED BOURGEOIS
INDIVIDUALISM
You're telling me/that we've been praying/ for a bright
and clever hell
I think we've been brought to our knees/ but I can't
tell...
Typically elegant response from Angus to the Vampire post.
Angus is surely right to identify that 'I'm very

spiritual, I'm not into organized religion' move as 'the
very pinnacle of dimwitted bourgeois individualism'.
There's a very serious point here. Capitalism, Marx

reminds us, 'has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of
religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical
calculation.'
Bourgeois individualism and miserabilism are coterminous

because there is no more terrible burden to bear than the
weight of subjectivity. Subjectivism leaves people in a
state of wretched confusion and desperation that is
literally hell, the only hell there is. The thought that
there is nothing more than conflicting monkey
perspectives, all of which are equally 'valid', is a
recipe for the kind of chronic depression that is endemic
in the west now.
As Nietzsche feared, no-one could could rise to the

terrible challenge of filling the space voided by the dead
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God, no human being could become the self-legislating

ubermensch. Nietzsche's breakdown was the breakdown of the
west, fastforwarded and compressed into one central
nervous system.
But what was the fantasy of the ubermensch if not a

grandstanding aesthetico-romantic glorification of
bourgeois individualism?
When they say they don't believe in organized religion,

their reservations aren't Deleuze-Guattari critiques of
organisation :-), they are just saying that they want to
continue to Carrie Bradshaw about in perpetual shilly-
shalllying consumer equivocation, treating life as a
buffet lunch to pick at.
What they want to preserve is the very thing that religion

can liberate you from: ego. They don't have the discipline
or commitment to subordinate themselves to the self-
disassembly program.
DESIRING SEDUCTION
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As a contribution to the sex discussion, I offer this,

which after six years or so, stands up rather well, I
think.
I'd be very interested in people's views...
SEPTEMBER 20, 2004

NOT THE WORLD'S GREATEST MANAGER, BUT IN THE
TOP 1
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R.I.P.
SEPTEMBER 19, 2004

THE FUNDAMENTAL SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE OF CAPITAL
Zizek brilliant on the Communist Manifesto:
'[T]he fundamental lesson of the "critique of political

economy" elaborated by the mature Marx in the years after
The Manifesto is that this reduction of all heavenly
chimeras to the brutal economic reality generates a
spectrality of its own. When Marx describes the mad self-
enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path
of self-fecundation reaches its apogee in today's meta-
reflexive speculations on futures, it is far too
simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-
engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any
human or environmental concern is an ideological
abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind
this abstraction, there are real people and natural
objects on whose productive capacities and resources the
capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like
a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this
"abstraction" is not only in our (financial speculator's)
misperception of social reality, but that it is "real" in
the precise sense of determining the structure of the very
material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the
population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided
by the "solipsistic" speculative dance of Capital, which
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pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed

indifference to how its movement will affect social
reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence
of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct pre-
capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no
longer attributable to concrete individuals and their
"evil" intentions, but is purely "objective", systemic,
anonymous.'
Posted by mark at 12:48 PM | Comments (11) | TrackBack
ENJOY!
A wealth of Lacan and Zizek linx.
SECONDHAND FANTASY
Karl Kraft draws my attention to the next in the
appallingly-named but fascinating sounding Sweatshop
series at the Serpentine Gallery.
Sadly, I'll be @ work, but I hope Karl will be able to

provide a report for the kollektive.
Second-Hand Fantasy
Tuesday 28 September
3-5pm
The Sackler Centre of Arts Education at the Serpentine

Gallery
Admission Free
Sweatshops are informal factories for ideas and debate.

This series of discussions invites writers, artists,
curators and theorists to explore current research
interests.
During the Glenn Brown exhibition (14 September – 7

November), Lisa Le Feurve and Edgar Schmitz will be joined
by invited speakers: Barry Curtis, Director of Graduate
Research and Postgraduate Studies at Middlesex University;
Kodwo Eshun, self-professed 'concept engineer' known for
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his theories on electronic music and its interface with

art, technology and machine culture; Adrian Rifkin,
Academic Chair of Visual Culture at Middlesex University;
and artist, John Timberlake. The panel will explore ideas
of science fiction, retro-futures and second-hand utopias.
For further information please contact

Louise Coysh, Project Organiser
Tel 020 7298 1533
Email louisec@serpentinegallery.org
SEPTEMBER 18, 2004

WHITE VAMPIRES AND BLACK FUGITIVES
They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus
That means guns, sex, lies, videotapes
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But if I talk about God my record won't get played - Kanye
Anger and humour are like the left and right arm. They
complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare
their uncompromising opposition to opression, and humor
prevents them from being consumed by their fury. - James H
Cone
What could better illustrate the Zizek's thesis that it is

Christianity that is the ultimate taboo in the west now
than the 'interview with a (real-life) vampire', Don
Henrie, in Thursday's Metro?
Don Henrie apparently 'sleeps all day, has had this teeth
filed and drinks human blood in closely guarded rituals'.
He also features in Mad Mad House , 'a new reality show
where guests have to live with Henrie, a witch, a
naturalist, a voodoo priestess and a "modern primitive"
who likes to hang himself from skin hooks.'
You can positively hear Zizek licking his lips when Henrie
answered the question, 'When did you last suck the blood
of a virgin?' thus:
'It doesn't work like that. We do it in tightly controlled

circumstances, among ourselves as willing participants. We
are all tested. When you look at other disciplines you
have things like chi or life force energy. You have
chakras that can be out of line. We believe similarly and
that blood-drinking restores them. The blood is just a
tangible and crude means of transferring energy.'
So, rather than being an unmanageable alterity, vampirism

is now presented as a moral, even healthy, lifestyle
choice. But the moral undperpinning for this cannot of
course derive from the Christian western tradition, which
is seen as - at best - a passe embarrassment. As Zizek
argues, it is those favourites of the master class at
leisure - 'zen bullshit' and New Aged out versions of
other Eastern traditions - that are the only permissible
sources for any moral justification in the 'enlightened'
western core now ('enlightened' is these secumenical pick
'n' mix PoMo svelsters' self-deluding self-description of
course; they are especially keen to differentiate
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themselves from the intolerance of Amerikan fundamentalist

Protestantism).
'I don't believe in religion, but, like, there's some

really gid stuff in zen ...' Zizek is surely correct that
rather than being in any way disruptive of western
capitalism, zen is the perfect lifestyle accessory for the
consumer-worker-zombie.
'It is not only that Western Buddhism, this pop-cultural

phenomenon preaching inner distance and indifference
towards the frantic pace of market competition, is
arguably the most efficient way for us to fully
participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the
appearance of mental sanity - in short, the paradigmatic
attitude of late capitalism. One should add that is no
longer possible to oppose this Western Buddhism to its
"authentic" Oriental version; the case of Japan provides
the conclusive evidence. Not only do we have today, among
top Japanese managers, a widespread 'corporate Zen'
phenomenon: for the whole of the last 150 years, Japan's
rapid industrialization and militarization, with its
ethical discipline and sacrifice, have been sustained by
the large majority of Zen thinkers - who, today, knows
that D. T. Suzuki himself, the high guru of Zen in the
America of the 1960s, supported in his youth, in 1930s
Japan, the spirt of utter discipline and militaristic
expansion?' (The Puppet and the Dwarf: the Perverse Core
of Christianity, 26)
Now I have many problems with Zizek's defence of

Christianity - which is in any case avowedly, and self-
consciously the very definition of deliberate perversity -
and I will take these up in a soon-come post on Zizek
versus Bergmann. But Zizek is surely correct in implying
that, far from being an opening of the west to the call of
the Other, the appropriation of zen et al is the final
breath of Orientalism. Or further: the Levinasian-
Derridean ethics of Otherness is itself only a supremely
refined version of Orientalism.
Instead of joining the dreary universal academic serenades

to the Other and to hybrid identities (which only confirm
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the molar identities from which they are mixed) it is much

more productive, much more subversive, to follow the lines
of flight pursued by the renegade deviations 'within'
'our' culture. Speaking more precisely, such lines are not
'within' our - or any - culture at all. On the contrary,
they are part of the Outside against the threat of which
all sedentary social formations are organized.
It is important to be rigorously non-dialectical about

this. The relationship between the interstellar fugitives
and the Death Star Empire Attractor is not reciprocal; the
imperial sedentary machines require the heartless
acephalic jungle as the ulterior zone necessary for the
production and continual reproduction of their identity.
But since k-jungle seeks only to flee, it experiences
Empire as a drag, an energy drain, whose only positive use
might be the provision of resources which can be cargo-
culted and pirated.
With all this in mind, it is worth opposing the apparently

more radical Malcolm X with the supposedly conservative
James Cone. For all his political acuity, X's conviction
that Christianity was essentially a white man's religion
left intact the alleged ethnic purity of the dominant
Christian tradition.
Cone took the opposite stance. He argued that it was

precisely the kind of Christianity practised by the
African slaves after they were violently abducted and
culturally annihilated in the services of building western
Kapital (although, naturally, their mass extermination was
only an accident, only a contingency; unlike Stalinism or
Maoism, cuddly Capitalism didn't mean to kill anyone, so
that's alright - ask Toneee, he's nice...) that was the
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essential form of Christianity. Paradoxically, though,

such Christianity was without essence in the
existentialist sense. It was what Kierkegaard called
'Christianity-in-becoming', a confrontation with ecstasy
and dread, an absolute existential commitment, with
nothing in common with the kind of smug, pompous Sunday
certainty that he decried in the Hegelian Euroisie.
You can hear Cone's black theology of liberation in Baby

Suggs' almost unbearably moving hymns to the black body in
Toni Morrison's Beloved (Jonathan Demme's traumatic-
exhilarating film of which must be one of the most under-
rated films ever produced), in Missy Elliot, or in Kanye
West, not only in 'Jesus Walks' but in his whole ecstatic-
ethical aesthetic.
Baby Suggs' black nobility bears out what Zizek argues

when he says that Nietzsche's attacks on 'slave morality',
far from being aimed at the slaves themselves, were
actually hyper-acute analyses of the decadence of the
democratic master class, which arrogates to itself all the
privileges of power but refuse to take any responsibility,
accounting for its actions in terms of the 'will of the
people', focus groups, etc. Deleuze-Guattari's claim in
Anti-Oedipus that the bourgeois is the first slave of the
ravenous machine of capital is thus strictly Nietzschean.
I can't resist leaving you with two more choice (carefully

performed by our own in-house doctors) cuts from the
Henrie interview.
'Blood can give people really bad stomach ache.'
And - best of all:
'Metro: Do you like your steaks rare?
Henrie: Yes, I do, but I saute them. The only type of

blood I am interested in is sic) someone who has been
tested and someone from my circle. I am still an omnivore
- I often just like to slice up some zucchini and saute it
with some sea salt and garlic.'
He should invite M Satai, Dylan Trigg and Anthony Hopkins
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round for a night's tasteful despair. Remember to bring

the rioja though.
I'm sure they'd all be very nice to one another.
IMPORTANT NOTE:
In the spirit of Deng Xiaipengesque experimentalism, I am

restoting comments for this post alone.
If bourgeois individualists insist on ruining discussion

again, they will literally be wasting everyone's time,
since their comments will be deleted and the drawbridge
will be drawn up again.
It really is a simple matter.
Just ask yourself this: are you interested in contributing

to the discussion, in discovering something, in following
a desubjectified line, or do you want to just sound clever
or air your own grievances? If the latter, please think
twice and don't post a comment. Do it on your blog.
LANK-HAIRED FOPS
Whore Cull incisive on Rural Nazis...
SEPTEMBER 17, 2004

THOSE HOMES ARE TOMBS
Unhalfbricking with some sage words on the comments
situation here... and a wonderful contribution to the
domesticity discussion....
'The notion that your home should be a way to show off

your taste, or your wealth, or your miraculous,
laboratory-like cleanliness is anathema. Those homes are
tombs, the modern equivalent of the burial chambers of the
pharoahs where they lay surrounded by their wealth, their
art, their mummified pets. It jolts me every time I return
to the family home and realise that there are no longer
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any books there...well, no books in the living spaces of

the house. All the books are concealed in the bedrooms
upstairs, a few on shelves, almost as many in piles on the
floors that are incongruous in a house otherwise devoid of
clutter. It's nearly imposssible to relax there - the
emptiness of the livingroom is oppressive, the cream
carpet and the unstable sidetables a nerve-wracking
combination.'
Yes, the emptiness of people's living rooms.... that

strange, oppressive vacancy....
HEADS WILL ROLL?

Heads will roll on the floor laughing more like.... :-)
(But, seriously, this all arises from Matt's - and Mark s

is guilty of this too - conflation of Lemurian Time
Sorcery with Fantasy bullshit.
As I said before, precisely the evil of Dean et al is that

they have forever associated sorcery with airbrushed
Fantasyscapes.
For Lemuria, think Marvel's pulp cosmology... Jack

Kirby... Lovecraft... sonic fiction....Underground
Resistance...
Not Rodney Matthews or bewhiskered wise old patriarhcs

pointing into the mist, guiding their young charge on the
quest towards the ancient city of Halfomdilllax wherein it
is reputed lies the object of their mysterious quest...)
LOOK WHAT FEAR'S DONE TO MY BODY

The sidewalk papers gutterpress you down - Roxy
Sex is boring - Infinite Thought
You want to hurt and crave again - Magazine
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Whenever I imagine total humilitation, it always involves

being psychically stripped in the tabloid Videodrome.
For those of us who've lived in the UK all our lives, the

UK tabloid-videodrome-papula is a permanent presence in
our heads, the worst thing in the world, the thing in Room
101... your own most embarrassing and pathetic moments
(and we all have them, folks) replayed on endless loop,
for the ephemeral delectation of the pruriently guffawing
masses. (There but for the grace of God go they....)
Naturally, such a scene need only be virtual for it to

exercise control; who knows what compromises, cautious
restraint, quietism we unconsciously opt for out of fear
of exposure in the Videodrome's humiliation-sensation-
machine?
The recent belief-beggaring monstering of Wayne Rooney

(he's a nineteen year old working class kid for fuxake,
lay off him you fucking resentful pighead alcoholic
Oxbridge scum*) once again demonstrates how integral a
component sexuality is in the English Master Class's
socio-psychic control apparatus.
Now, the Lawrentian 'healthy' sexualites would argue that

this is a perversion of sexuality, a 'reduction' of
sexuality to 'the dirty little secret' (cf Anti-Oedipus).
What if, though, sexuality is ESSENTIALLY a dirty little

secret? This is what Zizek dares to suggest, in a passage
which - in contradistinction to oday's lazy sex-pol
orthodoxy - praises 'the Soviet pedagogy from the early
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1920s onward' which argued 'that sexuality is inherently

patho-logical, it contaminates cold, balanced logic with a
particular pathos - sexuality is associated with bourgeois
corruption, and in the Soviet Union of the 1920s there
were numerous psycho-physiological "materialist"
researchers trying to demonstrate that sexuality is a
pathological state.'+
This is of to take the side of Orwell's O'Brien against

his Winston Smith and Julia. Orwellian liberal orthodoxy
has it that romantic-sexual passion is an eternal,
'natural' impulse, the projected re-engineering of which
signals once and for all the evil inhumanism of Marxism.
But what if O'Brien is right? What if sexuality,

particularly as expressed in us-against-the-world
coupledom, is irredeemably decadent, precisely because it
is 'natural', precisely because what we are dealing with
here is one of the most stubbornly persistent and
atavistic mammalian impulses? What if it is Smith and
Julia, not the kommunist drones, who are the real slaves -
slaves to passion - and O'Brien who is the Spinozist agent
of freedom?
The inhumanism of the Soviet state came from its

unequivocal dedication to the task of 'engineering human
souls', its ruthless subordination of Nature to Culture,
in the attempt (failed but nonetheless noble) to machine a
proletarian revolutionary class out of resistant bio-
socialized human material.
Almost no-one has taken seriously Foucault's rejection of

sexuality (which has habitually, and grotesquely, been
read inside the dominant sexualist paradigm). A
consequence of Foucault's challenging of the idea that the
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truth of ourselves/ our selves is to be found in sexuality

would be to view sexuality as basically trivial, no more
defining of 'the reality of what we are' than are our
defaecatory habits.
(Though with How Clean is Your Arse surely imminent, maybe

I speak too soon... Foucault's point is, though, that
there is that, presumably, any bio-cultural process could
fill the function of privileged bio-signifying behaviour
and neurotic attractor that sex serves for us ... You are
what you eat ....)
What the sexually tormented New England Burroughs sought

in the Nova Trilogy was not a release of his sexuality,
but a release from sexuality. There's no better writer on
the dreary-delirial treadmill of sexual desire, tristesse
and renewed desire than Burroughs. He understood that
(male) sexuality was essentially Sadean: i.e. an
autononomic agitational reflex that ceaselessly and
idiotically seeks release. The longuers in both Burroughs
and Sade arise from the repetitive tedium of sexuality
itself, its conservative slaving to the insatiable k-
pleasure principle.
It is Sade who proved once and for all that nothing

'sexual' can be perverse, since all sexual behaviour is
equally natural. Look at a dog fucking a chair leg. That
is the reality of natural sexuality.
The profound and inherent perversity of glamasochism, by

contrast, lies in its departure from sexuality in the
direction of a wholly artificialized or synthetic
eroticism. This is one of the things that the feminazi
anti-glam Glums don't get about glam. The Glums, like
Lads, associate glamour only with male sexual release, as
if the only way of responding to the beautified female
body is to emit seminal fluid, whereas the body of the
model can be a pure surface devoid of any interiority
which can be penetrated, either physically or psychically.
Such a body can be explored with a gaze that is tactile-
caressing rather than specular-phallic.
Here again, Foucault is an important guide: remember his
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distinction between a science of sexuality and an art of

erotics. Sadie Plant's unfortunately-titled essay 'Coming
Across the Future' is especially valuable in its
insistence on Foucault's practical search for what he
called the 'desexualization of pleasure'. The San
Francisco bath-houses presented Foucault with physical
encounters that were Spinozistic-machinic engagements with
bodies, in no way organic or personal, 'You meet men there
who are as you are to them: nothing but a body with which
combinations and productions of pleasure are possible. You
cease to be imprisoned in your own face, in your own past,
in your own identity.'
While Foucault's anti-sexual program inevitably takes

male-male encounters as its model, Irigaray's erotics in
This Sex Which is Not One privilege female auto-affection.
Much more than men, always tragically disabled by having
the body with organ, women have the potential for a
radically desexualized ecstasy, an unlocalized erotics in
which the whole body is an erogenous zone ('women have sex
organs more or less everywhere'). Tellingly, Foucault
could only find this through drugs. Whereas (male) climax
inevitably localizes pleasure, Foucault observed, 'things
like yellow pills or cocaine allow you to explode and
diffuse it throughout the body.' Perhaps it is only
through drugs, dancing and music that we men can get a
taste of what it is like not to be dominated by an
aggressively localizing libidinal apparatus.
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*(btw, donchathink that the class agenda of the tabloids

was fully exposed when, at the same time as they were
mercilessly white-trashing Rooney, they were mollycoddling
whining state-subsidized middle-class crybaby loser Paula
Radcliffe --- who, according to yesterday's Standard 'can
now reveal' she was suffering from a 'leg injury' that she
for some unstated reason 'had to keep secret'? - why can't
fucking athletes ever admit that they lost because other
people were faster than them?)
+ cf his remarks on 'today's deadlock on sexuality or

art'. '[I]s there anything more dull, opportunistic, and
sterile than to succumb to the superego injunction of
incessantly inventing new artistic transgressions and
provocations (the performance artist masturbating on
stage, or masochistically cutting himself, the sculptor
displaying decaying animal corpses or human excrement), or
to the parallel injunction to engae in more and more
"daring" forms of sexuality?'
SEPTEMBER 16, 2004

TALLY HO!
I used to live in a hunting community in Somerset; they
didn’t waste their time piddling about with foxes, but
went after deer instead. They can’t use the
straightforward ‘disposing of vermin’ argument about the
deer (although they do a damned sight more damage
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economically than foxes), because they had wiped them all

out on the Quantock Hills by the end of the nineteenth
century. Consequently they had to reintroduce them in
order to bring hunting back. Amusingly, the argument they
use instead is ‘we control the deer numbers, but if we
weren’t allowed to hunt them, the farmers (i.e. us) would
wipe them all out to protect their crops’.
Like Mark, I’m not that bothered about the hunters’ prey
when domestic animals are regularly packed into lorries to
be shipped long distances and greeted at the other end by
a walk into a building stinking of death, a bolt gun, a
hook, and some rather sharp knives. What I despise about
the hunting community is their belief that they have a
God-given right to do what they please when out for a
day’s jolly. Consequently, they tear up the countryside in
4x4’s and then park them wherever they fancy, blocking
roads and driveways with gay abandon: Just try asking them
to move, and see what happens. When they were meeting up
the road from her, the only way my friend could pick up
her kids from school was to park her car a quarter of a
mile away from her own house in the morning and walk out
to it in the afternoons. This was a bit of a bummer given
her chronic arthritis. Also, these buffoons have the cheek
to complain about dogs savaging sheep, when their packs of
hounds race around the countryside under very little
control, regularly disposing of domestic pets unfortunate
enough to cross their path.
Still, you don’t want to imagine that banning hunting with

dogs will do the foxes any favours: Last Summer some well-
meaning dolts released seven urban foxes into the woods
where I live, so that could have a happy life in the
country. My next-door neighbour poisoned the lot of them.
Posted by johneffay at 09:54 PM | TrackBack
WHO WANTS TO BE IN A HOVIS ADVERT ANY WAY?
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Woebotnik asks me (via email): isn't it only the

bourgeoisie who are opposed to foxhunting?
I'm not too worried about the foxes (although if they are
allowed their bloodsports, why aren't we allowed ours? Can
we have dog-fighting and bear-baiting back please?)
No. What I detest about the sanctimonous 'rural idiots'

(Marx) is their self-righteous conviction that their 'way
of life' is something we should all be interested in
preserving.
What is this sacrosanct 'way of life'? Rigid class

stratification left over from the middle ages... the rich
man in his castle, the poor man at his gate .... faithful
old Ted genuflecting to the Lord of the Manor... and of
course no black faces to be seen anywhere....
The 'countryside' is no more economically viable than

mining communities were. Not that mining communities, with
their brutalised workerist masculinism, were any more
worthy of preserving of course (you knew that the British
Old Left was hopelessly reactionary when it became fixated
upon ringfencing these archaims of early industrial
capital, instead of agitating for better jobs and better
quality of life for the people who lived in such
communities).
(And as I've argued before, 'communities' are in any case

essentially fascistic. John also usefully made the
distinction between communities and collectives, which I
think it is crucial to hold onto.)
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But if the argument about subsidies and economic viability

holds for miners, why doesn't it hold for rural
communities and farmers? The sheer barefaced hauteur and
arrogance of the hyper-aryan country twiterati coming into
the multi-racial city and telling us 'we don't understand
the difficulties they face' is utterly breathtaking when
you bear in mind that the urban areas generate most of the
wealth that is squandered on preserving the Medievalist
Theme Park they insist in living in.
They don't have to live there, after all. They could get
on their bikes and get a proper job, now couldn't they?
UPDATE: Otis Ferry
HARD LIFE IN COUNTRY

Don't even start me on that rural fascist scum....
How is it though that the Daily Mail can treat violent

protest as 'a sign of legitimate anger in the country'
when it is about protecting absurd ruralist rituals or
about keeping the price of petrol down, but not for any
other reason?
And how can they support the principle of subsidies for

League-of-Gentlemen-Tubbs-like olde worlde yokelocalities,
but reject them for mining communities?
Also note: Bryan Ferry's son, Otis, was amongst the

protestors.
From coal miner's son to privileged rural twit in the

space of a generation...
SEPTEMBER 14, 2004

INTERIOR DECORATION - INTENSIVE DEATH
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Incredibly, given the traumatic - but I hope

tragicomically resolving - events detailed at Radio Free
Narnia, Mark Sinker has managed to come up with typically
provocative and stimulating responses to my post on the
politics of domesticity:
'don't really buy yr v.momus-ish assault on interior-

decoration obsession on TV: as usual it lacks dialectics,
as usual the key detail is omitted of where the mass
unconscious is allowing itself to explore its resistance
to the K-KAPITAL-machine wotsname (= nowhere) (without you
say where generalised resistance is possible, the
KAPITALMACHINE is totalised = game over = capitulation)
the fact that the "insides" of our lives are now being put
up to Public Gatekeeper Contest is the first sign of the
(possible) rebirth of politics, not the final sign of the
retreat from it (ie it coincides with the ultra-ballardian
obsession w.plastic surgery)
(to jump back a wave, feng shui is abt the placation of

the gods =
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implicitly political; being on TV = it can be discussed in

the world = it is being/can be made explictly political)
(k-rad conclusion: we shd begin applying punk feng shui to

the reconstruction of our FACES) (haha that's the grace
jones line here - will yr feminist critics buy this i
wonder?) (actually i therefore think it shd be a punk feng
shui of our INTERNAL ORGANS) (the overall collage of TV
points us to this gracefully enough: it's only invisible
if you let yrself accept the genre boundaries which turn
TV from a portrait of the totality into a labyrinth) (an
effective prescient dramatisation of this = that dr who
series the WARGAMES i think)'
Actually, there is a link between that post and the post

on the Glampunk discontinuum that I hadn't thought about
prior to reading Mark's remarks: Hamilton's collage (and
the world - the exteriorized interior/ interiorized
external world - it opens up).
In the C4 documentary on Pop Art and Pop/Art I referred to

earlier, Ballard was especially enthusiastic about the way
that Hamilton's 'Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes
so Different, so Appealing' zeroed in on what, in a parody
of McLuhan, you could call the 'global living room' of
consumer Kapital. Hamilton's collage is absolutely inside
this strange world that has no insides, which McLuhan's
near contemporanous Mechanical Bride still feels it is
possible to critique. It will be a few years later, in his
essay on Burroughs, before McLuhan-O'Blivion, now
homeopathically innoculated to the Videodrome signal his
theory is helping to amplify, can describe the new mega-
mediated world from within it. It is a world, he said, in
which the central nervous system has been externalised;
where there is 'no privacy and no private parts'.
Baudrillard's theory, especially round the period of The

Ecstasy of Communication, also sets up unhome in this same
bunker-pod living space, this media-monad, this
representational vortex which is both the object and the
subject of a process of total mediatization that will
culminate in the end of the inside. Or (Jameson): the
production of a Kapital(ist) space in which there is only
36 de 104 26/12/22 12:29

inside.
Astonishingly, Hamilton knows all this, back in skiffle-

ersatz Britain 1956.
Look at the recording devices --- or are they

transmitters? And the man and woman, effaced, replaced, by
their own mediatized ideals. No longer the protected inner
space, oedipalized magic circle ---- nothing here but us
recordings.
Or, better: nothing here but the feedback.
As for dialectics, naturally, I plead guilty to not being

dialetical enough!
One of the very many problems with the Cult Studs uptake
of Gramsci was the grotesque appropriation of the concept
of hegemony. Rather than stressing the idea that the
working classes were complicit in their own repression,
the Cult Studs lobby seemed to suggest that hey we can't
condemn hegemony too much, coz, like, it has partly been
produced by the working class...
But the working class is not the proletariat.
Freedom cannot come through new, better representations,

but by fleeing representation altogether.
Conceiving of your own living space as first and foremost

a representation - for the big Other' gaze to inspect -
that's (intensive) death.....
Any way, Mark, I'm sure that everyone else in the

Kollektive will want to send their best wishes for you and
yr mum --- and we hope to see you for another walk again
soon ----
OUT OF THE HOTHOUSE

Naturally, like everybody else, I'm sorry to see Luke go.
I'm not capable of writing a heronbone tribute at the
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moment that exceeds this recent effort.
But that doesn't matter.
The best tribute a writer can have is the knowledge that

he has changed others' percepts, affects and concepts (the
three aspects of a body, according to Deleuze, glossing
Spinoza). If the blogs in our network are anything to go
by, it's evident that anyone who has sensitively engaged
with Luke's work over the last twenty months or so has
been changed, and changed for the better, by the contact
with his writing. I hope such a change is evident in what
I produce here, because it is certainly apparent in the
way in which I engage with the world in a renewed way.
The thrill of challenging and being challenged by an

attentive audience, the rages, the temporary consensuses,
the bursts of enthusiasm and equally sudden lapses into
melancholia that we have all undergone have meant that
blogging in our little network has been a hothousing
experience. The speed and intensity of the feedback
network - something that could only happen on the net,
could only happen NOW - has made possible a supercharged
efflorescence of discourse and writerly personae.
But if you are a serious writer, like Luke is, you

occasionally need time to withdraw, to collect and collate
and synthesise.
His archives are dense enough, rich enough to keep even

the hungriest heronbone devotee satiated for some
considerable time yet.
So long as Luke is still writing, that's all I care about.
Time to get out of the hothouse, as Jerry Cornelius said

in 1968.
But he'll be back, and better...
THIS TIME IT REALLY IS D.O.A

I'm so glad that, after thinking long and hard about it, I
38 de 104 26/12/22 12:29

decided not to buy tickets for Re~TG; Throbbing Gristle's

'one-off' reunion weekend at Camber Sands last May. Having
cancelled the original event due to poor ticket sales,
they said that they would curate an All Tomorrow’s Parties
in the coming spring. In the meantime they attempted to
placate the poor saps who had shelled out £130 each for
tickets by inviting them to a 'free' recording session
(read 'concert done on the cheap' with no proper lighting,
etc.) in London. I didn't go, but my spies were distinctly
underwhelmed by the whole thing. I think I'll pass on the
forthcoming DVD.
Anyhow, it now turns out that the promised weekend event

has been moved to December (should be lovely and warm in
the chalets then) and will be curated by the Chapman
Brothers, who were originally just going to be the
interior decorators. What a bummer to be feted as
electronic pioneers and the founders of the industrial
genre and discover that, when it comes to putting on a
musical event a couple of jobbing artists, whose idea of
the extreme is scribbling on Goyas, are perceived as
bigger crowd-pullers than you are.
So, something which was originally billed as a celebration

of industrial music in the Twenty-First Century now has a
line-up which looks like this. Goodbye Coil, Merzbow, and
Thighpaulsandra and hello Mercury Rev, Violent Femmes and
The Fall (who appear to have some sort of deal to play
every ATP event there is). People I know with tickets are
less than pleased. Still, at least Thee Majesty seem to
have been taken off the bill.
There was some concern that the original Re~TG was going
to blight their legacy; this little treat will flush it
right down the toilet.
Posted by johneffay at 02:56 PM | TrackBack
ALSO
Sean, too, is super-sharp atm.
39 de 104 26/12/22 12:29

SEPTEMBER 13, 2004

IT'S HER FACTORY
Nina's flat
An alternative view.
Nina's flat is a hive of activity.
An inspiration.
Not a living room, still less a domestic display case, but

a space in which impersonal production is always
happening.
(Yr average domestic living room is of course a place of

death.
Animal pelt everywhere....
and all the useless overpriced products of dead labour -

look at what I converted all those hours of tedious effort
into -
but most of all a dead zone of intensive stasis...
in which bodies are pathologized.... Take your shoes

off... Don't sit there... Would you mind using a plate?
and implicitly: Actually I'd rather prefer it if you were

dead... like the furniture...)
And no, Nina's flat is not a place that book binner should
be allowed to do her worst in.... Books there have long
since exceeded all available shelfspace, and now tower and
teeter, leant up against walls, drawers, fireplaces....
Each one a gateway to the Outside...
As are the images - photographs, postcards, posters,

reproductions of paintings - plastered, pasted, tacked on
every surface....
And here are insekt kommunists, Nina and Alberto in their

burrow, at least one always plugged into the k-space
matrix, tapping away at laptop keyboards contiguously
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placed on a cramped table, Marxist Rationalist agents in

an alternative 24.
The Politics of Domesticity
It's no accident that our current period of docilized

political quietism corresponds with an obsessive and
unprecedented cultural fixation on Interior decorating,
domestic hygiene etc.
One of the most thrilling aspects of something like Fight

Club was its outright and explicit rejection of this
regime. To work was to service the Ikea-fantasy appt ---
not the other way round. To get things happening entailed
destroying the domestic space ---- the sheer strangeness
of seeing a filthy house in a Hollywood film ----
A few remarks I made recently in the comments boxes which

I repeat here, slightly edited, since they might have been
missed:
'Potter's Nigel Barton.
What does Nigel's mum say when she hears the televised
Nigel talking about feelings of shame and embarrasment and
class? Potter is so acute - 'but the house is clean, it's
spotless.'
Because cleanliness, hygiene is as much a marker of the

working class as is cathode ray addiction. Is it really an
accident that TV's content is increasingly merging these
two impulses: watch TV/ be more neurotic about your
domestic hygiene. Message behind both: STAY AT HOME.
'It's her factory...' The fact that there is an inducement

to spend more and more time on domestic labour ... the
image of my grandmother 'blacking the step'... course if
you're into relativism, that's fine, hey you can't
criticize, it was no less worthwhile than reading books
and educating yourself. But if you find relativism
dangerous, quietist, then, really, you feel the
heartbreaking agony of lives that were lived below
potential.'
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The question should be how little time can I spend tending

my domestic environment? (Just as the question should be
how little work can I get away with doing in order to
subsist?)
To reconfigure domestic spaces as bases of operations, not

as display burrows fiercely protected from any kind of
Outside....
FAO: OPINIONISTS, GLIBERALS, SUBJECTIVISTS

'So they maintained it as certain that the judgments of
the gods far surpass man’s grasp. This alone, of course,
would have caused the truth to be hidden from the human
race to eternity, if mathematics, which is concerned not
with ends, but only with the essences and properties of
figures, had not shown men another standard of truth. […]
That is why we have such sayings as: ‘So many heads, so
many attitudes’, ‘everyone finds his own judgment more
than enough,’ and ‘there are as many differences of brains
as of palates.’ These proverbs show sufficiently that men
judge things according to the disposition of their brain,
and imagine, rather than understand them. For if men had
understood them, the things would at least convince them
all, even if they did not attract them all, as the example
of mathematics shows.'
Spinoza, appendix to Book 1 of the Ethics, (a passage

cited approvingly by both Badiou and Althusser)
NO SHIT
Hot on the heels of a government survey which revealed
that - prepare yourself for a shock - car mechanics
overcharge for services they perform badly, Which?
magazine today announced that most people do not trust
estate agents.
Well, at least no public money was wasted on the second

stunning revelation.
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So here's the latest k-punk competition. Keep your eyes

open... anyone who can spot a more fatuous and pointless
survey than either of the above will receive a k-punk no-
prize.
CHECK THESE
Philip is back, and on fantastic form.
My view of Lost in Translation is very similar to

Philip's, I think. Its restraint, whilst in principle
welcome given Hollywood's current sensory overload
default, never really convinced. Coppola seemed like a
director imitating the form of the art flick without being
able to deliver the affect, with the result that, oddly,
the film felt both underwhelming AND portentous.
However, Philip is right that Scarlett Johansson has a

luminous prescence which is not reducible to her physical
beauty. I approached the film expecting yet another boring
rentababe, but Johansson has an expressive power lacking
in the blank, interchangable mask that Hollywood
habitually selects for.
Obv I disagree about sex, though. The less of that sort of

thing, the better. :-)
Also on top form: Baal. Reached a new level, and the old
level was y'know, pretty damn high.
RESONANCE DOCUMENTARY
News from Resonance FM:
'20th Sept: Magz airs her music blogumentary Where's Your

Blog At with contributions from avid bloggers K Punk,
Simon Reynolds, Woebot, Luka Heronbone and Geeta Dayal'
For those outside London, Resonance is also available on

the internet. See k-punk sidebar.
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I wasn't uh too well at that time, so don't expect too

much from me....
SEPTEMBER 11, 2004

K-PUNK, OR THE GLAMPUNK ART POP DISCONTINUUM
\Gla"mour\, n. [Scot. glamour, glamer; cf. Icel.

gl['a]meggdr one who is troubled with the glaucoma (?); or
Icel. gl[=a]m-s?ni weakness of sight, glamour; gl[=a]mr
name of the moon, also of a ghost + s?ni sight akin to E.
see. Perh., however, a corruption of E. gramarye.] 1. A
charm affecting the eye, making objects appear different
from what they really are.
2. Witchcraft; magic; a spell. --Tennyson.
3. A kind of haze in the air, causing things to appear
different from what they really are.
4. Any artificial interest in, or association with, an
object, through which it appears delusively magnified or
glorified.
Glamour gift, Glamour might, the gift or power of
producing a glamour. The former is used figuratively, of
the gift of fascination peculiar to women.
Masoch: 'Every woman has the instinct and the ability to

make the most of her charms. It is an excellent thing to
give oneself without love or pleasure: by keeping one's
self-control, one reaps all the advantages of the
situation.'
Wanda in Venus in Furs
Glam IS punk; historically and conceptually.
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As Simon argued (what must be a year ago now), it was glam

that made the break which allowed punk to happen.
Essentially, glam returned pop to the working class

audience disgusted and turned by the hippies' lazy sleaze.
For all its 'androgynous' imagery, hippie was

fundamentally a middle class male phenonomenon. It was
about males being allowed to regress to that state of His
Majesty the Ego hedonic infantilism, with women on hand to
service all their needs. (If you don't believe me - and
I'll level with you I'm very far from being an objective
commentator on hippie lol, read Atwood's Cold Rationalist
classic, Surfacing to see how 'liberating' this was for
the women who lived through it).
'Thus even Zarathustra/ another time loser/ could believe

in you....'
Seventies glam played the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and

Evil and The Genealogy of Morals (the Nietzsche who
celebrated aristocracy, nobility and mastery) against the
young Dionysian Nietzsche. As Simon argued:
'Glam's tendency (through its shifting of emphasis toward

the visual rather than sonic, spectacle rather than the
swarm-logic of noise and crowds) towards the Classical as
opposed to Romantic. Glam as anti-Dionysian. The Dionysian
being essentially democratic, vulgar, levelling,
abolishing rank; about creating crowds, turbulence, a rude
commotion, a rowdy communion. Glam being about
monumentalism, turning yourself into a statue, a stone
idol.'
But glam rectified the genetic fallacy that haunted

Nietzsche's thinking. While there's no doubt that
Nietzsche's analysis of the deadening effects of slave-
moralising 'egalitarian' levelling in Beyond Good and Evil
and The Genealogy of Morals identified the sick mind virus
that had western culture locked into life-hating
disintensification-unto-death, his paeans to slave-owning
aristocratic culture made the mistake of thinking that
nobility could be guaranteed by social background.
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Nobility is precisely a question of values; i.e. an

ethical stance, that is to say, a way of behaving. As
such, it is available to anyone with the will and desire
to acquire it - even, presumably, the bourgeoisie,
although their whole socialization teaches them to resist
and loathe it. More than anyone, Nietzsche understood
that, the European bourgeoisie's deep hostility to 'the
notion of superiority' concealed a viciously resentful
psychopathology.
If Nietzschean atheology says: we must become god,

bourgeois secularism says: No-one may be greater than me -
not even God.
Everyone knows that there has always been a deep affinity

between the working class and the aristocracy.
Fundamentally aspirational, working class culture is
foreign to the levelling impulse of bourgeois culture ---
and of course this can be politically ambivalent, since if
aspiration is about the pursuit of status and authority,
it will confirm and vindicate the bourgeois world. It is
only if the desire to escape inspires taking a line of
flight towards the proletarian collective body and Nu-
earth that it is politically positive.
Glam was a return to the Mod moment(um) that had been

curtailed by the hippie hedonic longeur of the late 60s.
Like most names for subcultural groups, the term 'Mod'
started off life as an insult, in this case hailing from
the mods' perpetual adversaries, the rockers. As Jeff
Nuttall explains, to the rockers, "'Mod' meant effeminate,
stuck-up, emulating the middle classes, apsiring to a
competitive sophistication, snobbish, phony.' (Bomb
Culture, 33)
But no dilettante/ or filigree fancy/ beats the plastic

you
Mods in the sixties were very different from how they

appear in the designer cappuccino froth of 80's soul-
cialist retro-mythologization. It was the rockers who
appealed to the 'authentic' and the 'natural': their
rebellion posed as a Rousseauistic resistance to
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civilization and mass (produced) culture. The mods, on the

other hand, embraced the hyper-artificial: for them,
Nuttall wrote, 'alienation had become something of a
deliberate stance'. Nobility was not innate for mods:
rather, it was something to be attained, through a
ruthless de-naturalization of the body via decoration and
chemical alteration.
The mods were in every sense hooked on speed, and the

black American music they gulped down with their bennies
and coffees was consumed in the same spirit and for the
same reasons: as an accelerator, an intensifier, an
artificial source of ecstasy. That is, as a chemical rush
into Now, NOT as some timeless expression of Pride and
Dignity.
In the desire (my official position on this now btw is

that 'libido' should be used in place of 'desire')-
pleasure relation, there is a third, occluded term:
sensuality.
The hippies' sloppy, ill-fitting clothes, unkempt

appearance and Fuzzed-out psychedelic fascist drug talk
displayed a disdain for sensuality characteristic of the
western master class (hey man, it's all about the MIND).
When hippies rose from their supine hedono-haze to assume

power (a very short step), they brought their contempt for
sensuality with them. Brute functional utilitarianism plus
aesthetic sloppiness and an imperturbable sense of their
own rights are the hallmarks of the bourgeois sensibility
(look at all those shops in Stoke Newington that say
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they'll open 'tennish' and you know exactly what class

you're dealing with).
The hippie power class wanted power without having to go

to the effort of power dressing. Naturally, middle class
hippie 'feminists' never missed a stride in their move
from alleged egalitarianism to supercilious
judgementalism. What is the disdain for cosmetics and
clothes if not an attack on the working class? The
assumption of bourgeois so-called feminists is that their
lives of neurotic bed-hopping 'freedom' and Carrie
Bradshawing perpetual adolescent equivocation are better
than the working class pattern of (once) getting married
young and (now) having children young, when it is clear
that it is just another trap - and not necessarily a more
congenial one.
Now the bourgeois philistines have destroyed glam and

returned us to their preferred aesthetic mode:
Romanticism. The contemporary bourgeois Romantic has
realised Romanticism in its most distilled form yet. While
the so-called Romantic poets, musicians and painters of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century remained
sensualists, whereas our contemporary Romantics are
defined by their view that sensuality is at best an
irrelevance, a distraction from the important business of
the expression of subjectivity.
Romanticism is the dressing-up of Teenage Ontology as an

aesthetic cosmology. Teenage Ontology is governed by the
conviction that what really matters is interiority: how
you feel inside, and what your experiences and opinions
are. In this sense, sloppy drunkard Ladette Tracy Emin is
one of the most Romantic artists ever. Like Lads - the
real inheritors of the hippie legacy - Emin's bleary,
blurry, beery, leery, lairy anti-sensualist sensibility is
an advert for the vacuity of her own preferences.
What we find in Emin, Hirst, Whiteread and whoever the

idiot was who rebuilt his dad's house in the Tate is a
disdain for the artificial, for art as such, in a
desperately naif bid to (re)present that pre-Warholian,
pre-Duchampian, pre-Kantian unadorned Real. Like our whole
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won't-get-fooled-again PoRoMo culture, what they fear

above all is being glamoured. Remember that glamour means,
'Any artificial interest in, or association with, an
object, through which it appears delusively magnified or
glorified.'
But let's make our case by considering some artifacts in

some detail.
Exhibit one: the cover of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure,

1973
The image is a mistresspiece of ambivalence.
Let’s approach it through the eyes of Ian Penman, the most

consummate of Roxy observers. (No doubt, Penman, like me,
is endlessly drawn back to Ferry because he took the same
journey from the working class into acceptance into the
English master class).
(I make no apologies for citing Penman’s text, ‘The

Shattered Glass: Notes on Bryan Ferry’ at some length,
since it is almost criminal that this bravura display of
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theoretical elegance should be mouldering amidst the pages

of a long-forgotten, chalk dusty Cult Studs collection*).
‘On the shoreline of For Your Pleasure, beneath it, on the

waterfront strand, stands the second of many new models:
at first sight the second installation of the stock Ferry/
Roxy woman.’
But to get the full picture we have to fold out the

sleeve, so that we can see Ferry looking on...
Penman goes on:
‘Ferry fills out his function as her chauffeur (landlocked

ferryman: a sign of the times). He waits in amused
admiration, surveying the neatness of the visual pun - the
model takes her cat (for a) walk: forming a uni-form and
uniformly predatory alliance with her black panther, eyes
and mouth directed out at the viewer. Imperiously, she
takes the air, she fields his grace, takes her anima for a
prowl and a stretch. Ferry - for sure - remains to be
seen, smiling manfully behind her back, artfully protected
by the fold in his sleeve. He had arranged his own look as
both within and outside of the main frame.’
(’Within and outside of the main frame: is that so often

where we find ourselves, lost, stranded, these days ---?)
Cut.
‘She is a model woman, to be sure; fashion pushing into

abstraction and rarified codification, not there for the
benefit of a product as such or altogether in the name of
Art; so she appears to be what? She appears, on the
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condition that she appear to be without attributes. We can

attrribute nothing to her beyond a certain imaginary realm
of wealth, of wealth as fetish, (Helmut) Newton’s law of
physiques. She is sheerest sharp blue nothingness. (For
the cool-and-blue post-Duchamp artist, it seems entirely
for beauty to take the veiled form of scissors.’
As an aside, since this concerns another debate: the last

things Ferry’s songs were - at this stage at least - were
‘just good tunes’. The first thing they were, were
questions: including questions about what a good tune
might mean...
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And - at this stage- Ferry's songs were no more 'love

songs' than Magritte's Human Condition was a
representation of a landscape. Like Magritte, Ferry's
sheer coldness and distantiation cannot but draw our
attention to the framing machines that make possible the
emotions of which he sings.
Another cut, to a 'realm of a certain narcissistic

eroticism he is not allowed entrance to without putting
his heterosexual sensibility in doubt.’
‘All his Songs’ women (and this will be especially so with

‘Stranded’ and subsequent plaints) are voiceless sirens
who - although wielding the utmost power over the artist’s
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life and sensibility - seem to be without implication

(which is to say: eternalised out of existence). Neutered
time and place (those perennial spans of Fashion) coalesce
naturally into the figure of the woman. Woman as figure,
or scene - war pin up, cat-woman, amazon, siren,
Riefehstahl Maedchen.’
[W]ielding the utmost power over the artist’s life and

sensibility...’ The utmost power.... Is he, the artist,
Severin, the protagonist of Masoch's Venus in Furs? Or
Sarasine, the hapless hero-dupe of Balzac's novel who
unwittingly falls in love with a castrato?
Amanda Lear with Dali
Because, you see, the ironic punchline was: she is

not(-all) a woman.
Amanda Lear, the For Your Pleasure model was a transsexual

(though, in yet another complication, she later denied
it). A transsexual, moreover, whose operation might have
been paid for by none other than Salvador Dali.
Either way, it is clear that Ferry has set the tone for a
1970s in which the male is both glamorous and glamoured,
himself a gorgeously-styled photogenic object, entranced
and seduced by a cosmetic beauty he partly wants to make
contact with, but mostly wants to cold pastoralise into an
immutable untouchability. 'Mother of Pearl' - which as
Penman observed on Pillbox, is the whole of Lacan in seven
minutes, more or less - is the closest Ferry comes to
writing a manifesto for his meta-melancholia, a meta-love
song about the impossibility - and undesirability - of
attaining the Ideal object.
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Now this melancholia is not straightforwardly 'tragic'

(and even if it were, it would have little to do with any
bourgeois sensibility, since, as everyone from Shakespeare
to George Steiner [The Death of Tragedy] to Nietzsche to
Bataille demonstrate, bourgeois secularism is inherently
inimical to any notion of the tragic).
But Ferry's sensibility is definitely Masochistic. (As

opposed to that of the Sixties, which, as Nuttall, for
one, suggests, was Sadean. Compare the Sixties-sired
Lennon's 'Jealous Guy' - the Sadist apologizes - to
Ferry's reading of the song - the masochist sumptuously
enjoying his own pain - for a snapshot of a contrast
between the two sensibilities.)
The Masochist's perversity consists in the refusal of an

exclusive or even primary focus on genitality or sexuality
even in its Sadean polymorphous sense, which is perverse
only in a very degraded sense.
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.
How had Ferry got here, become stranded in the early

seventies, an artist-voyeur art-director Masochist?
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Richard Hamilton, 'Just What Is It That Makes Today's

Homes so Different, so Appealing' (1956)
Ferry famously studied painting under Richard Hamilton,

the so-called godfather of British Pop Art, at Newcastle
University. Can we even begin to reconstruct the impact
that Hamilton's art had on British culture?
Well, you can get some impression of it from the fact

that, in a documentary on Hamilton made by C4 in the early
1990s, Ballard cited Hamilton's 1956 'Just What Is It That
Makes Today's Homes so Different, so Appealling' as one of
the cultural events that made it possible for him to be a
science-fiction writer. It would be better to say that
Hamilton made possible Ballard's exceeding of science
fiction, his discovery of k-punk.
'56 was, of course, the year of Presley's breakthrough

records. In its own way, though, Hamilton's collage was at
least as important as Presley in the development of
British Pop. (You see Siobhan, everything starts in
Newcastle!)
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After the 50s, Pop and Art have always been reversible and
reciprocally implicating in British culture in the way
that they are not in America. Nuttall: 'The students and
the mods cross-fertilized... Purple hearts appeared in
strange profusion. Bell-bottoms blossomed into wild
colours. Shoes were painted with Woolworths lacquer. Both
sexes wore make-up and dyed their hair... The air in the
streets was tingling with a new delirium.' (34)
British pop's irreducible artificiality makes it resistant

to the Romanticist naturalization that the likes of Greil
Marcus and Lester Bangs achieved in respect of American
rock. There is no way of grounding British Art Pop in a
landscape.
Not a natural landscape in any case.
If Art Pop had a landscape it would be the agressively

anti-naturalistic one Ferry collaged together on 'Virginia
Plain' (named after one of his paintings, which was itself
named after a brand of tobacco). Is this an internal
landscape, what the mind's eye sees? Perhaps. But only if
we recognize that - as Hamilton's collage and Ballard's
fiction insist - in the late twentieth century the 'space'
of the internal-psychological was completely penetrated by
what Ballard calls the media landscape.
When the British pop star sings, it is not 'the land'

which speaks (and what does Marcus hear in the American
rock he mythologizes in Mystery Train if not the American
land?) but the deterritority of Amerikan-originated
Consumer culture. Hence the braying grotesquerie of
Ferry's singing voice on those early Roxy releases. (And
the different grotesquerie of today's simoting pop idols.)
With the firsthand expertise of someone who has had to

lose his voice in order to speak (for that is what you
must do if you educate yourself - or are educated - out of
a working class background ), Penman brings out very well
how integral the problem of accent - of losing a Geordie
accent, of not gaining an American accent - was to Ferry's
career.
As a student, Ferry's life was divided between his daytime
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movement through the art milieu and night time fronting of

a soul band doing covers. Two voices, two lives. 'I hadn't
found anything to incorporate all of me.'
The early Roxy records are Ferry's Warhol-Frankensteinian

attempts - the joins still showing, thrillingly,
horrifyingly - to hand-machine a space that would
incorporate his day and his night self. So they are not so
much expressions of a coherent subjectivity as a kind of
destratification-in-progress, the production, on the fly,
of a Pop Art plane of consistency which he could feel at
unhome in.
So here was a Pop music, astonishingly, more shaped by
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Duchamp than Bo Diddley. The methodology Ferry deployed on

his solo albums of cover versions (and remember that such
albums were almost unknown in rock music at the time) was
explicitly Duchampian. His renditions of standards such as
'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes' and 'These Foolish Things' were,
he said, Duchampian 'readymades': found objects upon which
he put his own stamp.
Duchamp's Large Glass (aka The Bride Stripped Bare by her

Bachelors, Even): the version in Tate Modern was
reconstructed by Richard Hamilton
Part of what made the early Roxy sound so cold -

particularly by comparison with the hot authenticity of
American rock - was the fact that they were evidently not
an aggregation of pontaneous, creative subjects, but a
meticulously executed Duchamp-type Concept: a group whose
every gesture was micro-designed, and who credited their
sylist, fashion designer Anthony Price, on their album
sleeves.
Bryan Ferry on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1973, in black

contact lenses and Anthony Price suit
The great temptation for Ferry would always be to slip

inside the frame: to become, really, the heartaching
bachelor in the dreamhome, to achieve what Simon calls the
'fantasy of stepping outside the lowly world of production
into a sovereign realm of pure unfettered expression and
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sensuous indulgence, an imaginary and fictitious notion of

aristocracy (more Huysmans than real lords who have to do
humdrum things like manage their estates, juggle their
investments, do a bit of arms dealing).' To achieve the
total simulation of manners that he was up till then only
pastiching-affecting.
And, isn't Simon right, aren't Ferry's later records all

about 'the disillusionment of actually achieving the
supermonied aristo life--Ferry, condemned to mooch jaded
forever through art openings, fashion shows, all
tomorrow’s parties (that old tis better to journey than
arrive line)'?
Let's leave Ferry there, stranded, framed.
And cut.
To 1982. Compass Point, Nassau.
Grace Jones' astonishing recording of Joy Division's

'She's Lost Control'.
Masoch: 'A slap in the face is more effective than ten

lectures, especially if it is delivered by the hand of a
lady.'
Kodwo Eshun: 'The womanmachine Grace Jones' 82 remodel of

Joy Division's 79 She's Lost Control updates the '50s
mechanical bride. For the latter losing control meant
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electric epilepsy, voice drained dry by feedback. For

Jones, the female model that's losing control induces the
sense of automation running down, the human seizing up
into a machine rictus. The model - as girl, as car, as
synthesizer - incarnates the assembly time of generations,
obsolescence, 3-year lifespans.
The model is the blueprint for the post-Cold War cyborg,

the womanmachine modified and mutated by the military
medical entertainment complex. Hence Kraftwerk's The
Model, where the bachelormachines are threatened by the
womanmachine's superior reproductive capability. The Model
is an excerpt from the post-war machine-reproduction
wars.' (095)
Jones is the sublime object before which Ferry prostrated

himself -- and who talked back. Through vagina-dentatal
teeth.
Be careful of the womanimal-machine. It bites.
Jones is not a cyborg because she is not an organism of

any kind (and the modifier 'cybernetic' is in any case
redundant, since all organisms, like everything that
works, are cybernetic).
She is a neurobotic femachine.
The mechanical bride stripping her bachelors bare.
Jones was herself once a model, but when she has the
opportunity to 'express herself', she ruthlessly exploits
her own body and image much more than any (male)
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photographer would have dared to. 'In a recent poll by

Men's Health magazine, the male readership named Grace
Jones ... among the women who scared them the most.'
(Brian Chin).
The game becomes the hunter.
She out-Duchamps Ferry, (dis)covering his 'Love is the

Drug' as a found object to be absorbed by the femachine.
Jones understands her body Spinozistically as a machine

capable of being affected and producing affects. This body
is in no way limited to the organism; it is distributed
across photographs, sound and video - and none of these
media constitute a representation of an originary organic
body. They are, each of them, unique expressive components
of the Jones singularity.
It's total immanence.
There is no Grace Jones the subject who expresses her

subjectivity in sound and image. There is only Jones the
abstract hyperbody, the cut-up scissormachine that cuts
itself up, relentlessly.
The Jones body is immanent, too, in that, as Kodwo

repeatedly insists of sonic fiction throughout More
Brilliant than the Sun, it produces its own theory.
Certainly, by the time that Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto'

limps onto the scene, it is only to mislead via
reterritorialization.
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The cover of The Anvil: Steve Strange photographed by

Helmut Newton
Cut again.
To London, 1982.
(Reproduced from the early days of blogger k-punk.)
The sex appeal of the inorganic.
Paul Tickell's review of The Anvil,

NME 27 Mar 82 (whole review reproduced on the excellent
Magazine site):
'I'd thought 'Contort Yourself' the right kind of music

for Newton's sado-eroticism - but 'The Anvil' is a greater
approximation. You wanted -the moderne dance - well ...
here it is: the night-time moves of marionettes - dummies
- puppets - clowns - and imaginary celluloid beings. -it's
all a little deathly - the sound of commodities fucking -
but a noise which can be a good deal more exhilarating
("the sex appeal of the inorganic" - Walter Benjamin) than
healthy fun-loving creatures going at it.
All in all - Visage are a rather seductive disease - the

skull beneath the made-up skin.'
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More material from early k-punk:
'Roxy versus Visage: a shift from subject to Object

(therefore, following Baudrillard's logic in Seduction,
from masculine to feminine). Fem-glam notwithstanding,
Ferry retained for himself the male role of the one-who-
looks . The problem , for Ferry, is the (male) gaze - how
much to look? For how long? 'Then I look away/ too much
for one day.' Strange, meanwhile, is invariably the
looked-at . He is the discarded plaything in 'Mind of a
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Toy' (telling title, that), the object of gossip in The

Anvil's maudlin 'Look What They've Done' and 'Whispers.'
The model, here, is, --- the model: the anxiety - how am I
seen ?
Can we assume, btw, that Gibson derived the name

Neuromancer from 'New Romantic'? If so, Gibson's
transposition suggests a much more interesting, and
appropriate, name for the nerve sorcery of these newly-
wired electronauts. 'Romantic' always struck me as way-off
beam for a culture so fastidiously uninterested in depth/
emotions/ truth.)
The case against Visage always seemed to me to depend on

rockist prejudice: they didn't play live, they were a
vehicle for a clothes horse who 'couldn't sing', they
represented the return of prog. Isn't there also a
masculinist agenda, too, in the implict rejection of the
'superficiality' of fashion and clubbing?
Visage thoroughly stripped their sound of the trappings of

r and r, ostentatiously parading an Un-American ancestry.
Thematically and sonically, Visage evoked a decadent
Europe of seductive urban alienation (cf the Mondrian-like
vision of endless high rises in Blocks on Blocks) and
sumptuous glamour (cf the name, and the track, 'Visage';
the French vox on 'Fade to Grey'), conjured through
vocoder vox, synthesizers and Billy Currie's pseudo-
classical flourishes. American influences came rerouted/
refracted through Europe: Moroder disco; Morricone (cf
McGeoch's 'Once Upon a Time in the West'-isms on the
Spaghetti western/ Clint tribute 'Malpaso Man' off
'Visage'). Cinema was a major node: much of Visage's sound
belongs to what would later be called 'virtual
soundtracks' (Barry Adamson, one of the architects of this
genre, was of course a Visage member). The mood was one of
dis-affection, not the robotic functionality of Kraftwerk,
nor the schizo-dislocation of Foxx/ Numan, but the Euro-
aesthete's 'exhaustion from life', nowhere better
expressed than on the Interview with the Vampire-like
'Damned Don't Cry.' Visage didn't thematize machines in
the way that Kraftwerk, Numan and Ultravox did: like
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Yello, they seemed to operate in a future-past glittering

hall-of-mirrors in which synthesizers and electronics were
less a new innovation than a taken-for-granted mainstay.
Visage's 'cyberpunk baroque' is a link between Roxy Music,

Vangelis, disco and what would later become dance culture.
Anyone who doubts this should check out the dance mixes of
Frequency 7 or Pleasure Boys: the instrumental breakdown
in the Pleasure Boys remix is pure acid house, and
Frequency 7 is nothing but a breakdown, a thrillingly
anachronistic slice of machine-techno. It was no doubt
Strange and Egan's role in the Blitz/ Camden Palace that
facilitated the move into dance. Making clubbing and
dancing, rather than the gig, central was a crucial step
(for Visage specifically, but for the New Romantic scene
in general). Strange was less important as 'frontman' than
as pure image, his very diffidence and passivity as a
vocalist anticipating dance's later complete effacement of
the singer.'
Except the singer doesn't get completely effaced by dance.
It returns as the femachine Roisin.
Cut to Now.
I've little to add to my recent remarks on Moloko and
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Roisin Murphy as the latest - but I hope not last -

contribution to the Art Pop story.
But it's worth distinguishing Murphy from two artists John

recently mentioned in the comments boxes: Madonna and
Kylie.
Minogue is a sex worker in the most banal and degrading

sense, since it is clear that her simpering subordination
to the Lad's Gaze is nothing more than a career(ist)
gambit. Murphy, by contrast, gives the impression of
enjoying herself, of doing what she would do any way (and
just happening to have an audience). It's clear that she
enjoys attention (male or otherwise) but like all great
performers, her jouissance seems to be fundamentally auto-
erotic. The audience function not as passive-consumer
onanist spectators, but as a feedback component in the
Roisin-machine.
And unlike Madonna, Murphy does not photoshop out all the
joins and the cuts in her performance. Whereas Madonna's
hyper-professional show is all about attaining the cgi
seamlessness of a corporate film, Murphy - pulling her
leather fetish boots on onstage - is always playing -
albeit seriously.
'Q: You’re becoming quite the style icon, is that an area

that interests you?
R: Well, I think I dress for myself, I mean, I’ve always

dressed up anyway, and I just enjoy it. I think maybe
people are just fed up of pop stars that are told what to
do and what to wear.'
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SEPTEMBER 10, 2004

(N)UTTER
Taking family and their kids round a sweet bit of
Sheffield today we were confronted by a mad xtian hippy
who snarled at and threatened us until my repeated and
polite requests that he go away were finally acceded to.
Our infraction?
My sister's 3 year old was wearing my son's devil horns

headband.
"We take pure babies and make devils of them! That's what
we do!"
I was shaken but unbowed. And the experience served to

illustrate the pointlessness of maintaining an open space
for abuse by the foul of mind and heart, which is the
conundrum with which K-Punk has wrestled these last few
weeks. A new tragedy of the commons.
Well THIS commons is defended, friend, and we'll be damned

if we let you spoil it. We are not Over, but you are OUT.
67 de 104 26/12/22 12:29

Posted by paulmeme at 05:29 PM | TrackBack
COMMENTS POLICY (LATEST)

Basically the situation atm is this....
Luke, as ever, is right.
The comments boxes have become almost completely

unproductive. Almost all of the worthwhile discussion
happens between members of the kollelktive, who, if the
comments boxes weren't there, might be inspired to produce
their own posts.
The comments boxes have heated things up --- and SPEEDED

things up.
They need to cool down and slow down.
Yesterday, when I closed most of the current comments

boxes down, you can't imagine the relief I felt. I could
come to k-punk without feeling sick with anxiety about
what unthought out oedipalised rage, overgrown adolescent
boy sulks and gliberal stupid American platitudes ('hey
man, all that Marxist lingo makes my cringes cringe...') I
would have to deal with.
It was definitely more stressful than work. And I have a

very stressful job.
My problem is that I atrribute rationality to positions

and people who clearly are incapable of exhibiting it.
It's partly to do with my background, which persists at a
neuronic level, in the insistence: YOU ARE INFERIOR, BEND
YOUR HEAD. So even when I am faced with clinically
deranged second-stringer stalker-obsessive autists with
delusions of relevance, part of me thinks, hmmm maybe they
are right.
They most certainly are not.
There is no more urgent task on this hell planet than the

production of rational collectivities.
These are not fascist gangs with 'leaders'. Nor are they
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perfectly functioning neurobotic Spinozist networks. No,

but they can be on the way to this latter, if there is a
commitment amongst the collective to a STARTING FROM WHERE
YOU ARE.
Demanding perfection before you are prepared to commit is

Prog Tech SF.
Starting to build a way out of hell HERE, NOW is

kyberpunk.
The Kollektive takes priority. In the comments boxes as

they have developed in the last few weeks (k-punk as New
ILM..... yeucccchhhhhhhh!), the Kollektive has struggled
to make itself heard over the howls of outraged
subjectivists, Conflict-Addicted Organisms (CAO's), and,
worst and most pitiful of all, ILM-style one-liner one-
upmen.
Do you feel alienated by this?
Good.
And goodbye, then.
The comments will be restored if there is a way of

restricting them to registered users only.
We are not here to entertain you.
SEPTEMBER 09, 2004

WORDS OF WISDOM
From Murray of Whore Cull:
It was argued most people in this blogosphere tend to be

of lower-middle/upper
working backgrounds. Kollektivization (minus any of its
negative implications) acts as a bulwark against the
gliberals and co whose families have been embourgeoisified
for generations, people who are absolutely embedded in the
BritCrap system and opposed to any progressive opinions. I
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have just had another day kowtowing to these Mediated

idiots who, relatively happy with how life treats them and
their role in it, abuse their intelligence for the sake of
pointless one-upmanship, examples of which we've been
seeing on the K-Punk forum...
POSITIVE NOTE AFTER A TRYING DAY

Bought the Dizzee Rascal elpee today....
Uttunul be praised, this is one of the greatest albums

ever released in Britain, the hardkore kontinuum's
vindication and - for the moment - culmination.
Longer post on this third great work of black kyber punk

this year (after the Kanye lp and I, Robot) tomorrow, if
not too wasted after a day's administration...
Also remind me to post on the politics of domestic

tidiness (in response to Infinite Thought), God and
improvistation, North Korea: anti-capital utopia, and the
outer child ...
MR. TRIPP EARNS A TUPPENCE PER EVERY USE OF THE

WORD "WHILST", OR, NOTES FROM THE WINEBAR
70 de 104 26/12/22 12:29

UNDERGROUND
At the risk of re-outraging the emolliators, conciliators
and stoner pacifists, I cannot allow Carter McBeath's work
of collage-satirical genius to moulder away in the
comments boxes.
So, go on, have a laugh, enjoy yourself --- and know that
ridiculing pomposity is a k-punk DUTY....
Here's a lyric by Peter Sinfield and Dylan Tripp. Guess

which lines belong to whom.
'Ringed By Ants And Musing Over Man, featuring "Poets of

Decay", and including "I Cannot Resist His Solemn
Pomposity"'
Lyric by Peter Sinfield and Dylan Tripp
Wagner blows his tuba whilst another fracture of the

ceiling erodes
Harlequins coin pointless games, sneer jokes in parrot's
robe
Lizard bones become the clay –
An evocation of Chauncey Gardiner gliding down the hallway
CHORUS:
Who'll give me comfort when the moon rides in the pines

An aesthetic commitment to fatigue, silence, and decline
The wise men share a joke; I run to grasp divining signs
It permits a sense of moral autonomy whilst Simultaneously
affording the aesthetic pleasure of decline
Worship!" cried the clown, "I am a TV”

I do not suffer from depression so the formula is alien to
me
Burn slow to ash just as my days now seem to be
It is like returning to Mahler and remembering how rich
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things can be
REPEAT CHORUS
A sublime sense of elevation amongst the pitiful waste of

the asylum transpires
They slide across your frying pan and fertilize your fire
And thereafter the everyday recedes,
Poets' starving children bleed
(MELLOTRON FLUTE SOLO)
Here, the surface, rotten through dampness, upturns whilst

its gaze lingers in suspended decay
Burnt with dream and taut with fear, the yellow jester
does not play
Resonances of Schopenhauer’s disinterestedness simmer,
All veiled in a quasi-prophetic tone whilst still
maintaining an academic rigour
REPEAT CHORUS
Grass in your hair stretched like a lion in the sun

I renounce Cairo whilst I furrow deep beneath the waste of
the asylum
Snuff brown walls where Spanish lizards run
I am maintaining Baudelaire’s view that dandyism is
incompatible with being a woman
Damn iron minded, gold braid blinded, officers and
gentlemen!
REPEAT CHORUS
Blown autumn leaves shed to the fire where you laid me

We look to open expanses of glass and accordingly feel
open and free
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For now Prince Rupert's tears of glass make saffron

sabbath eyelids bleed
Ontological space clarified not through the appearance of
stability but through the presence of the unhomely, the
world depicted in debris
REPEAT CHORUS (x 2)
Quivering in an anecdotal malaise,

Plastering the vacuum with yesterdays riddle
Now tales Prince Rupert's peacock brings
Waves sweep the sand from my island,
From me
SEPTEMBER 08, 2004

REMINDER
Final call for contributions to NOISETHEORYNOISE#2,
10-6pm, Saturday 20th November 2004, Middlesex University,
White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR.
We invite contributions to NTN#2 on the following topics

from noisicians of every stripe, whether they be noise
makers, noise enthusiasts, or inventive but unsanctioned
noise theorists:
What are the methodological and aesthetic specifics of

"japnoise" as a genre? Is there something like a common
"modus operandi" running through the works of Hijokaidan,
Masonna, Hanatarash, Merzbow, etc.? What makes it matter?
What constellates noise and the so-called "industrial"

and/or "power electronics" scene from the 1980s (e.g.
Whitehouse, Ramleh, M.B., New Blockaders, P16.D4, Etant
Donnee, Pacific 231, etc.)?
What transformed historical and technological conditions

produce the so-called "noise aesthetic"? What is
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the noisician's dependence, if any, on the novel

possibilities of sonic production offered by the digital
revolution?
Is noise enjoyed? Who enjoys it? Are noisicians

perverted abnegators who, due to emotional deficit, are
unable
to experience the full affect of soul/pop/classical music?
Is there an interface between the praxis of noise and

sampling / turntablism? How is it informed by montage,
collage and/or cut-up? What does noise offer materialist
historiography?
This list of topics is not intended to be exhaustive so

please feel free to contact us if you would like to
address a topic not listed above. Audiovisual equipment
will be available and we actively encourage presentations
in which examples of the noise being discussed can be
played for the audience. But bear in mind that each
presentation should last no longer than 30 minutes.
Please send your proposals/abstracts by 30 September 2004

to andymcgettigan@another.com and
ray.brassier@btopenworld.com.
Alternately, you can mail proposals to Ray Brassier,

Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy,
Middlesex University, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR.
COMMENTS ON COMMENTS
A lot of the recent arguments here over editing comments
boxes and so on have focussed upon two related claims:
Firstly, that one cannot build a kollektive if one edits
comments; secondly, that the blogosphere itself is a
kollektive, so consequently joint authorship of K-Punk is
not required in order to create one. I think that both of
these stem from a misunderstanding of what a kollektive
is.
The distinction to be drawn is between a kollektive and a
74 de 104 26/12/22 12:29

community. The blogosphere is a series of interrelated

communities in which people respond to each other about
their respective interests. A Kollektive, on the other
hand, entails a deliberate attempt in forging a tightly
linked commonality between individuals as an experiment in
joint thought. Whilst disavowing its nature as a project
(at least in this case), it would operate within a fairly
restrictive set of parameters. These parameters were
initially proscribed by Mark, but people invited to join
are well aware of what they are. Consequently, it should
be no surprise that people should be expected to remain
within them.
Stalinism? Good manners really. As has been pointed out,

people are free to disagree in whatever manner they like
elsewhere within the community. Anyway, I guess Mark is
already censoring all the porn out of the comments boxes;
what about all the poor visitors who are missing out on
this interesting material due to his repressive action?
Before I get hauled before the non-K-P thought police and

accused of nauseating sycophancy, I’ll just point out that
there are lots of points with which I disagree with Mark
(in fact I suspect I might be a K-Hippie, or at least a
K-Prog…), but it would not be interesting or useful to
bang on about them on this site which has a defined
purpose. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t tell them to
him elsewhere. It also doesn’t mean that discussion on
relevant topics should be stymied on K-P. There is a
difference between saying 'I don’t understand that', or 'I
think that works this way' and ‘Get thee to an analyst,
fool; you have delusions of grandeur’.
Posted by johneffay at 02:49 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
K-PUNK T-SHIRT DESIGNS
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76 de 104 26/12/22 12:29

Click, print and propagate...
FRANZ FERDINAND WIN MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE

The sad thing about Dizzee winning it last year was it
legitimated the whole all-mates-together Jools-on-the-
pianner backing Wiley, a clapped out never-was rocker,
some disgusting consumer-soul whinehouse etc etc gliberal
consensual paradigm (coz it's like all music isn't it?).
So it's great that arch-conservative tediocrats Franz
Ferdinand won and returned it to what the prize awarders
REALLY like (white whingers with guitars). They must have
felt their done their duty to the colonies for a while and
could now go back to rewarding Proper Music.
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Best quote from last night: Vox Pop on the panorama of

great British music upon which we were invited to feast
(Snow Patrol!), teenage girl - 'Franz Ferdinand...?
Haven't heard em. But my dad listens to em...'
Did like that polite m/c singer-fellow's eye make up

though. (But shhh don't tell the Department of Cultural
Studies in Cornwall.)
SEPTEMBER 07, 2004

PUNISHMENT ENOUGH
So on the way to meet Ray and Glueboot in Bloomsbury this

evening for typically stimulating conversation, Sphaleotas
and I picked up a copy of the Evening Standard. For those
outside London: the Standard really is an uncommon joy - a
peculiar mix of the Chris Morris you-couldn't-it-up-
bizarre ('Tale of Rex, the Dog Cut Open to Smuggle
Drugs'), Stelfox-infuriating bourgeois puffery (I'm a
Victim of the Great Public School Rip-Off', fashion
(beautiful pic of Christina Ricci from tomorrow's Pop
magazine American Gothic photo-spread) and all sorts of
other metropolitan bits and bobs, some written with
perspicacity (The Times' Simon Jenkins is an occasional
columnist, for instance).
But what particularly drew me to this edition was a report

by Andrew Gilligan on the new 73 bendy buses.
The 73, the busiest bus-route in London, was the bane of

my life when I lived in Stoke Newington. People think that
Bromley is isolated, when the reality is that you are only
ever 20 minutes away from central London by frequent
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train. Getting to and from the tubeless Stoke Newington,

however, is like planning a prison break. The lurching,
stop-start 73 journey through the cramped and soot-
blackened claustrophobic streets of North London has
always been nerve-scrapingly horrific, and you have to
allow at least an hour to get from SN to the west end.
In fact, Sphaleotas and I had made the journey on the 73

up to Stoke Newington on Saturday. But the normal ordeal
of the route was intensified by the fact that, only on
Friday, the well-loved Routemaster double-deckers had been
replaced by New Improved 'bendy buses' --- concertinaed
progstrosities, which wheeze and lurch through the narrow
thoroughfares with all the graceless, hulking
ponderousness of tranquilized, wounded brontosaures.
The rationale for replacing the old buses remains slightly

mysterious. I suppose the hop on, hop off permanently open
door at the back of the Routemasters gave EU2's Health and
Safety Nazis apoplexy. And the civilized notion of a
conductor has for a while seemed like an absurd and
unjustifiable luxury in central London's screwfaced
Metronoiac meanness, which seems to have be driven by a
malevolent will to make everything as nerve-shreddingly
frustrating and obstructive as possible.
But why replace double-deckers with buses that take up so

much space on the road and that have the turning circle of
Lee Chapman? Ah, it must be Prog Tech...
When Sphal and I entered the bus on Saturday (having

already gone through a version of the buy-a-ticket-at-the-
machine-before-boarding farce recently hilariously
recounted by Oliver --- there's a whole seething
undercurrent of rage against this mangerialist innovation
in London at the moment: every time buses stop,
discontented passengers are airily waved away by the
drivers, spitting and raging in fury at the stupidity of
the new regime. It's something like this that will
kickstart the revolution in Britain), we were told off,
schoolma'am style, by the driver. 'Sit down, DON'T show me
your passes....' Like we were callow K arriving in the
Castle and unwittingly flouting one of its arcane
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protocols.
The bus wheezed as far as Newington Green before it seemed

to have clapped out. Already late for our assignation with
Glueboot, Infinite Thought, Mark s, smunk and others, we
sat there, the driver on the radio to Central Control, for
an interminable, indeterminate period, before the wounded
leviathan stirred itself and we were on our laborious way
again.
It was none other than Andrew Gilligan who wrote the

report on the new buses in the Standard today, in a piece
so saturated with bile that I could have written it.
'... after a cattle-car journey from Third World hell, I

and 120 other Londoners never want to travel on another
bendy bus again.'
'To save time on the journey, you need to buy your ticket
from a machine at the bus stop. But nobody, apart from
Travelcard holders, who boarded at my stop paid because
the ticket machine at Newington Green was not working.'
Now to the Private School piece, which I share with you in

a spirit of unapologetic class rage.
Rose Fawcett (is that really here name? For fuxake?)

writes powerfully and movingly about the desperate plight
of being a parent paying 15 K a year for your child's
primary schooling. I really felt for her. Listen to this
heart-rending passage:
'On my desk, under the new Toast catalogue, lie three

school fee invoices totalling a whopping £15,000... I work
out at this rate not only can I not afford the very
covetable gaucho boots from Toast, but we will be bankrupt
by December.'
Well, that would be a terrible shame, wouldn't it?
Honestly, now, this is parody, right? She's trying to

sound as objectionable as possible, surely; that's the
only explanation. No-one could really be so crass and
snobbish.
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Wait, wait though:
'My friend Charles rubbed it in by smugly telling me that

his children went back to the establishmen the calls 'Free
School' last week...'
And:
'... as I have learned (and, to be honest, I already knew)

the bright ones at state primaries have every chance of
getting into top public schools, if that's what they want,
particularly since switched-on parents are spending the
money that they have saved on private fees on tutoring.'
Now, Dave, are you going to hire the hitman or should I?
What a pitiful indictment of a class. No wonder the middle

class turn out so hollowed-out and titanium-constricted.
Parents like the lovely Rose have already damned their
kids to a life of joyless competitiveness before they are
born, their lives and aspirations micrometer and slide-
rule straightlined from Minute One.
As Mark E Smith sagely put it, it's not a question of

making people feel guilty for being middle-class. How
could you possiby be jealous of them? 'Public school is
punishment enough...'
SEPTEMBER 06, 2004

DRUNK ON THE POPE'S BLOOD
Apropos a conversation we had on the walk on Saturday -

the definitive account of the Two Thousand Year Reich.
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SEPTEMBER 05, 2004

NEW COMMENTS POLICY
Please note:
feminazis, cult studs guilt mongers, passive consumer-
whingers, 'friends' who occupy the moral high ground,
misanthropes, gliberals, stoner pacifists, therapy-
pushers....
Whilst I disagree with Luke's idea that comments boxes

should be closed entirely, I have decided to institute a
new policy on comments.
Only comments deemed to be positive by the Kollektive will

be left up. The purpose of the site is to build the
Kollektive, so comments by those intrinsically hostile to
the notion of collectivity or those hostile to the k-punk
project per se will be deleted as soon as possible, so as
not to waste the energy of the collective on distracting,
egocratic nonsense.
Clearly, I am at work throughout the day, and unlike some

UK public service managers, my job does not allow me to
spend all day in front of the computer. I am hoping though
that, when I am not available to delete comments, others
in the kollektive can be deputed to take over.
Maybe another solution would be to only allow registered

users to comment.
Commenting here is a privilege that has been abused.
k-punk is not a 'liberal' or 'democratic' 'free for all'

(cf the prisoner). There are plenty of other ill-
disciplined forums where people can air their resentments,
ill-thought bile, and tedious ego-defence opinionism.
Or of course you can say what you like on your own blog.
They really are very easy to set up.
What could be easier than sitting on the sidelines and

carping? I know some people get a nice warm feeling in the
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stomachs from their sense of innate superiority to all

'groups' and 'gangs'. Perhaps what those people should do
is follow the logic of their position to its logical
conclusion and utterly withdraw from public forums and
indeed public life altogether.
Perhaps even more egregious though is the passive-consumer

whinger. Think, really, how outrageous it is for the likes
of 'Roger' to appear in the comments box and assure me
that I am 'coming off like a prick.' On my own site. I
don't say that k-punk is my site in a possessive sense. I
just mean it is space that has taken me a great deal of
time, stress and anguish to build. It really is like
inviting someone into your own house and having them abuse
you. If anything makes me a 'prick', it is accepting a
situation like that.
After all, Roger, and others, you have paid absolutely

NOTHING for access to this site. Nor, naturally, have I
received any financial remuneration for producing it. That
isn't to say that I haven't received massive positive
affect from doing it --- what could be better than being
part of a collective network? But it really has reached
the point where I dread coming to k-punk to see what
irrational spleen or spoilt boy/girl moodiness I will have
to waste energy on dealing with next.
SEPTEMBER 04, 2004

WOW
Just seen an ad for this:
Apocalypse TV
tomorrow night on UKtv documentary
includes
both
THREADS
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and
THE WAR GAME
two of the most traumatic films ever made in Britain
ADVICE FOR SOME WRITERS

Most of the books published in England were already dead
before birth. It was disgusting, really. One would have
expected a certain amount of development in the field of
preventive medicine. Captain Mackenzie has suggested a
contraceptive on the fountain pen as a suitable remedy.
That way they could scribble all day and do no harm to
anyone.
Michael Moorcock, 'The Dodgem Division', 1968
SEPTEMBER 03, 2004

SPEAKING OF PRETENTIOUS CRAP
Is this sad case worth any more of our energy, readers?
' Even a cursory inspection of my blog...' is all my eyes

can take before the 'glaze' override kicks in.
I suggest three competitions. Lucky winners will receive a

thesaurus signed by Dylan Trigg (he won a boxload when
scientifically proved to be "writer" most unlikely to be
able to complete a sentence without its use).
1. Worst DT sentence. Plenty of candidates clearly --- but

what do we mean by worst? Most pompous? Most portentous?
Most unreadably convoluted? Most humourless?
2. Best DT parody. Now, this must include incorrect use of

apostrophe obv, sentences so stodgily packed with verbiage
that the concept of flow is entirely alien to them, and
must convey that sinew-busting attempt to appear
authoritatively detached and mature (I sometimes see this
in teenagers' writing at work).
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3. Can anyone find a worse written blog than Poetics of

Decay?
Dylan assures us that he's never suffered from depression.

Dylan, sweetie, I doubt you've suffered from anything...
besides delusions of competence as a writer and theorist.
Enjoy your rioja and your Cioran though. Very stylish!
STEAMPROG
So, after listening to Under Milk Wood and thinking about

Richard Burton, I was reminded of his role in Jeff Wayne's
War of the Worlds.
It's not an album I can ever recall hearing in its

entirety previously, though I do remember hearing snatches
of it at other kids' houses around the time it came out in
1978.
(btw I know nothing about Jeff Wayne --- who is he? All
google searches seem to lead to War of the Worlds -- yeh,
I know he did it, but who IS he?)
So I searched WoW out and lo and behold, it's astonishing.

The album was regarded as the last hurrah of prog (after
this, it was only the Alan Parsons Project, i.e. all the
bombast and virtuosity-fetishism but none of the
overreaching anti-commonsensical absurdity Mark s rightly
celebrates in prog proper), but blimey if all prog albums
were this good then the whole genre really would be in
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need of urgent rehabilitation.
Burton's cigarette and whisky-soured narration is of

course crucial. But what is most impressive about the
whole album is its consistency: sections flow into one
another seamlessly, sonic figures differently repeat. No
obtrusive tempo changes, no displays of fretwankery that
dissipate any incipient plateaus into ego platforms. No:
it's virtuosity in the service of consistency.
If someone like John Zorn had done this, the Wire would be
all over it. And there are sections of really disquieting
electro menace.
Partly what makes the album work is its fidelity to the

vision and temperament of Bromley boy Wells. Burton is as
perfect a voice for Wells as he was for Le Carre and
Thomas. The dark tinge that Burton's haunted intensity
brought to Thomas' lyricism is ideally suited to Wells'
bleak anglo-nihilism.
What people can forget about Wells is his almost gleeful

apocalypticism. Time and again, he simulates the
incineration of the (unhomely) home counties suburban
world. As this page brilliantly shows, Wells took a
postive delight in The War of the Worlds in imagineering
the destruction of the Home counties and London:
'I completely wreck and sack Woking -- killing my

neighbours in painful and eccentric ways -- then proceed
via Kingston and Richmond to London, selecting South
Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity...'
Wells, who came from the same petit-bourgeois background

as the Underground Man and the Nazis (cf Kipps), was able
to sublimate the massive inward pressure of his class
resentment into 'scientific romances'; the Nazis, who
failed as artists and novelists act it out for real:
Ballard: 'Goebbels in his diaries remarked that he and the
Nazi leaders had merely done in the realm of reality what
Dostoyevsky had done in fiction. Interestingly, both
Goebbels and Mussolini had written novels, in the days
before they were able to get to grips with their real
subject matter.'
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The Nazis' abortive project of integrated Fortress Europe

(EU1) was SF become hideous fact - the Progressive project
of modernist ultra-planned pan Europe hygenationalism
amphetamined out into a line of scorched earth hyper-
destruction (Hitler, like Eden and Kennedy after him, was
wired on speed during the perpetual crisis mode of his
leadership).
Ccru: 'The Core Master Class - relic anthropoid

superstrata - condemn Hitler, even in private. Whilst
applauded as 1st Grand Wizard meat-puppet of
Electrocorporate Old Occident power, he can't be forgiven
for blowing EU-1.
It has taken 40 years to repair the damage, armed with

nothing but normal fascism, normal commerce control,
normal crisis police methods, and decaying Jesus video...'
The Euro Prog technicians of EU2 - 'normal fascists' like

Blair, Berlusconi, Chirac - have learned more stealth.
Wayne's War of the Worlds replayed Wells' insanely

prescient eve of destruction 1898 apocalypse-simulation in
the wake of punk and at the time of the postwar consensus
collapse of the Winter of Diskontent. Perfect...
The pop jewel at the heart of Wayne's terrible-beautiful

epic is Justin Hayward's 'Forever Autumn', one of the most
achingly evocative English pop songs ever. On the album,
its Keatsian rapture of melancholia ('my life will be
forever autumn/ coz you're not here...'. shall I compare
my desolation to an autumn day?) is startling contrasted
with the most traumatically intense sections of Burton's
narration.
'Never before in the history of the world had such a mass

of human beings moved and suffered together. This was no
disciplined march, it was a stampede without order and
without a goal. Six million people unarmed and
unprovisioned driving headlong. It was the beginning of
the rout of civilization, of the massacre of mankind.'
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It's an astonishing ice-vivid account of a xeno-techno

total take over of a culture that could not but invite
comparison, not only with the later Nazi lebensraum, but
with the then current imperialist scramble. 'The War of
the Worlds takes us to the bottom of the colonial/imperial
heap and says: here's what it feels like, you bastards!'
This brings us to another steamprog classic: Moorcock's

Nomad of the Time Streams series, which were Wellsian
scientific romances which interrogated the concept of
empire and its implications. What if the British empire
had continued?
Enough for now.
'my only hope of survival... a boat out of England....'
'The clever one tends to emigrate.' (MES)
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SEPTEMBER 02, 2004

THREE THOUGHTS FROM GRACE
From The world of Grace Jones
1. MEN ARE TERRIFIED OF ME. I CAN EASILY STEP INTO THE

MAN’S SHOE, AND THAT PUTS THE MAN IN A POSITION WHERE HE
HAS TO BECOME THE FEMALE. THAT'S WHAT SETS OFF THE
TENSION. BUT MY IMAGE IS SUPPOSED TO FRIGHTEN MEN - SO
ONLY THE GOOD ONES COME THROUGH.
2. I WASN’T BORN THIS WAY. ONE CREATES ONESELF. I BELIEVE

WHATEVER I DREAM. WHATEVER I DREAM, I WANT TO DO.
3. I THINK I’M DOING A SERVICE TO BLACK WOMEN BY

PORTRAYING MYSELF AS A SEX MACHINE. I MEAN, WHAT’S WRONG
WITH BEING A SEX MACHINE, DARLING? SEX IS LARGE, SEX IS
LIFE, SEX IS AS LARGE AS LIFE, SO IT APPEALS TO ANYONE
THAT'S LIVING - OR RATHER IT SHOULD.
ON I, ROBOT AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

Steamrollering into the cyberpunk forum.... Hello!
It is common in a sci-fi storyline for robots to 'break
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their programming'. The recent film I, Robot presumed to

twist this conceit by having the robots doing evil things
without breaking their programming. Much along the lines
of the Djinn in the trashy horror film "Wishmaster" (where
an evil genie deliberately misinterprets the wishes of his
masters, who invariably end up mutilated in some humourous
manner). For me, I, Robot was much less fun (in this
respect), and served to propagate yet more tedious
misconceptions about the nature of both machine and human
intelligence. Programming a robot is not as easy as you
think.
I will attempt here to use I, Robot to illustrate some

misconceptions about the required nature of workable
machine intelligence...
Human beings ARE robots. The most hi-tech robots in

existence (as far as any of we humans are aware). Even the
stupid ones. We've been incrementally designed by the
effects of evolution on DNA, constructed from our genetic
code via RNA. (Yes, I am very aware that 'evolution' is a
problem word, abused and distorted all the time). Forget
your normal associations. Animals are robots constructed
from organic matter (carbon is a very useful material -
much better than metal, and nature discovered this long
long ago).
Think of a fly trying to get out of a window with a narrow

opening. You can see the simplicity of its built-in
algorithms. It's pretty much:
do while (away_from_light AND not dead)

fly_towards_light();
loop
If it weren't for turbulence and other subtle complexities

of the physical world it would never get out of that damn
window.
This is how all of the computers that we use in every day

life work. Every condition and possibility (or method of
describing ranges of possibilities) must be prescribed, or
the computer can't do the job, or it gets stuck in a loop
(which is what is usually happening when you see "Not
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Responding" in Windows). If a possible error has not been

predicted (e.g. "glass_invented"), then the computer/robot
will get stuck.
Intelligence could be defined as an ability to 'step

outside the system'. If you were stuck in an underground
tunnel and wanted to escape, you might well start a
go_towards_light() loop, but if the light turned out to be
coming from a tiny grating that you couldn't get through
then you'd break out of that algorithm, or modify its
structure [e.g.
go_towards_light(where_source_size_is_bigger_than_self )].
A classical computer is incapable of making this sort of
modification to its algorithms.
A cursory glance at the robots in I, Robot, even the OLD

ones, is that they are not based on classical computing.
They can learn and execute commands that have not been
hard-coded in their operating systems. The robot running
to bring a bag for its owner could not have had all the
procedures pre-programmed for THAT EXACT TASK.
More to the point: the ability to understand plain English

and respond correctly - the ability to act on language-
based (as opposed to button-pressing) instructions is a
plain sign of some sort of intelligence. You need the
fuzziest of fuzzy logic and the most dynamic of learning
structures to understand the massive variety of accents,
unfamiliar words, and to know what questions to ask if you
don't understand, or you'll go straight back to the shop
as your owner asks for her money back.
If the holographic recording of the dead scientist ("You

must ask the right questions") represents a classical
computer (it could have conceivably been pre-programmed to
expect Will Smith's voice and ways of asking questions,
though it would still have needed a certain amount of
fuzzy logic to parse the language so easily), then the
millions of robots living in the homes of all kinds of
people represent this second-generation approach to
computing. They are intelligent, in the same way that
humans (and dogs and dolphins) are intelligent: they can
learn from their environment, and they can step-outside-
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the-system.
You can't program a human with a set of static algorithms.

Just try telling a child to repeatedly attempt an
impossible task - they'll give up very soon.
Therefore, the implementation of Asimov's 3 laws of

robotics is FAR FROM TRIVIAL.
So we have to look at HOW HUMANS ARE PROGRAMMED. I posit

that we are programmed THROUGH OUR EMOTIONS. To program a
second-generation robot, you have to make it feel pain
when it tries to disobey one of your rules. This is
necessarily a fuzzy method of programming. You can
anticipate a much wider range of possibilities by tapping
into your robot's perceptual system. The robot perceives
that it might be killing a human and the pain-response is
triggered. This is how humans work. We know the
ambiguities of the perception of wrong-doing only too
well.
I, Robot implicitly assumes, by making Sunny such a

sympathetic character, that the set of morals and emotions
that human beings have are in some way special - a natural
outcome of any instance of intelligence. This is not the
case. Our emotions and morals are installed primarily by
our DNA, albeit heavily filtered by our (cultural and
physical) environment. Schizophrenic tendencies are
genetic (by which I mean varying degress of psychotic,
pathological and paranoid tendencies, as well as creative
and depressive mentalities). Interestingly, it is by
reference to rare schizoid, 'malfunctioning' humans that
Will Smith's character defines his own humanity (in the
slightly contrived conversation with Sunny in the police
station).
But our programming is contingent on its benefits for the

replication of DNA in its environment. Our moral
philosophies bounce around inside a limited set of
possibilities, limited by our pre-programmed feelings that
respond to learned perceptual responses. The real range of
possible emotions is unlimited. We could just as easily
(even ACCIDENTALLY) program one of our second-generation
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machines with feelings of pleasure on killing a human (in

much the way that a malfunctioning human - a psychopath,
might take pleasure in such an activity), but only through
emotional programming.
Think how impossible it would be to program a robot arm in

a factory with the hopelessly abstract constraint that it
'is not to kill any human'. You'd need light sensors,
sounds sensors - all manner of perceptual systems, then
you'd have to program it with responses to each
combination of stimuli, and even then it would still get
it wrong. You err on the side of caution and it stops all
the time. You take an optimistic approach and some stupid
factory worker creeps up on it and gets sliced in half
before the machine knows what has happened...
Coming soon: "When the Humans Break Their Programming"
Posted by smunk at 02:14 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
BY THE THREE RINGS OF BANILLINYON (THE

INITIATION OF A YOUNG MAGE INTO THE SEVEN
SPHERES OF DYLNIFF)
I'm sorry Mark s but even by your standards of contrarier

than thou, wouldn't knowingly sign up to any position that
might be described in some quarters as orthodoxy (I'm
teasing - lol), rehabilitating this is about twenty
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diplodocus steps too far IMHO.
(And yeh, dinosaurs are nice to look at, - I very nearly

wept with delight when I saw Jurassic Park - but, like, I
wouldn't want to be one especially... Big, lumbering, top-
down machine with tiny brain... yeh that's Really Existing
Capitalism alright....)
Anyone who can look at the lettering alone and not

simultaneously (a) feel involuntary physical disgust and
(b) laugh uproariously, just geddoudda here....
And look look, you gotta check out the Flash sideshows...
obv my machine has trouble loading them, but hey that's
Prog Tech, nice to see that Rog has moved with the times
and made sure even more time and energy is wasted on these
progstrosities...
Look, look, the water like moves, man.... cosmic....
And people say Dali was kitsch --- gimme a break ----
Linda Trent tells me that in Lemurian 'Roger Dean' is

equivalent in meaning to both the English 'irredeemably
naff' and 'anti-sorcerously pernicious'....
How so? Well, speaking personally, it took me years and

years of deprogramming (but not by the Kowalsky brothers)
to dissociate the concepts of 'sorcery' and 'mysticism'
from the nauseating image of white-bearded wizards walking
through a windswept airbrushed Deanscape.... No doubt
called 'Xantranadon' .... or 'Phalmalmador'...
Hey readers, how about a little creative writing

competition? Who can come up with the best story
'inspired' by one of Dean's flash animations?
Mine's going to be called 'In the Caverns of Xilliakanis:

The Annunciation of Jezopod Andalyias (Part 1)'....
(By comparison with Dean, most of the covers on the page

that Carter McBeath links to [see comments below] are
pretty mild stuff; I can cope with all that sunshiney
overexposed pyschedelic stuff much more than Dean's
nauseatingly hilarious Sword 'n' Sorcery Fantasy lands...
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but Carter's right, the Gryphon cover does take the

biscuit, I mean the airbrush, I mean the Flash
animation....)
As Carter says:
'For my money, the Gryphon album is the clear winner here:

wise old man playing chess, whilst the killings of
inevitably cruel nature take place outside his cloistered
quarters. I can't figure out if the old git is supposed to
be god (y'know, controlling the paces of our clockwork
existence via the astonishing parallel movements of
baldy's chessboard - HEAVY!) or maybe he's just cloistered
cos he's wise enough to be saddened by the inherent
cruelty of clockwork existence, blah blah, et cetera.
Somehow I have the feeling that, back in the salad days of

yore, Toney Blur spent many a dazed, glassy-eyed evening
with chillum in one hand, Gryphon sleeve in the other -
and just FREAKING over the DEPTH of it all and the
FRAGILITY of existence.'
O, and I should make it clear that, in addition to

loathing without reservation Star Wars and all its
PROGeny, I fucking detest Lord of the twatting Rings too.
And no, I haven't wasted time and energy on seeing the
films. The arguments people make for seeing them are
EXACTLY THE SAME as those kids at school made for seeing
Alan Parsons Project and their ilk: 'hey, you might not
like the music, but you gotta respect the SHOWMANSHIP and
the LIGHTSHOW.'
No I have fucking not.
The Fantasy genre is shit. Categorically.
MY SEX
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my sex/ waits for me/ like a

walking down the street - mongrel waits/downwind on a
kicking cans/ looking at the tight rope leash
Billboard - oh so
bland/summing up the people my sex/ is a fragile
- checking out the acrobat/sometimes I'm a
race/doing what I'm doing - novocaine shot/sometimes I'm
feeling out of place. an automat
walking/walking - in the my sex/ is often solo/

rain. sometimes it short circuits
then/sometimes it's a golden
feeling like a woman - glow
looking like a man/ sounding
like a "no-no" - making what my sex/is invested in/
I can/ singing in the suburban
darkness - shining in the photographs/skyscraper
night/ he coming conclusion shadows on a carcrash
- right isn't right. overpass
walking/ walking - in the my sex/ is savage, tender/it

rain. wears no future faces/ owns
just random gender
come in all you jesters! -
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my sex/has a wanting
wardrobe/I still explore/ of
all the bodies I knew and
enter all you fools/ sit
those I want to know
down "no-no" - old girl
fools/ my sex/ is a spark of
trip the light fantastic - electro flesh/ leased from
dance the spiral hips/ the tick of time/ and geared
coming conclusion - gotten for synchromesh
off your lips
my sex/ is an image lost in
faded films/a neon outline/
on a high-rise overspill.
WILDLIFE
SEPTEMBER 01, 2004

ON THE PLAZA WE'RE DANCING SLOWLY, LIT LIKE
PHOTOGRAPHS
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Craner on Canary Wharf. (Permalinks a bit screwed.. scroll

down to Wednesday, August 25, 2004 entry....)
In addition to everything else Oliver does so well (the

incisive political analysis, the eyes-off-the-road
enumeration of the teeming fauna and flora hidden in plain
sight of the metropolis, is there a better writer on the
slick appeal of Oed-I-pod consumerism and haute couture,
of sad-eyed beautiful city girls? Like Baudrillard, Oliver
has an innate understanding of the weakening seduction of
glamour, of its feminizing allure... (btw Alderman
Undercurrent, I blame Oliver for starting the cult of the
sublime Nadine... lol) Nothing could be further from the
blurry videodrome-fed monkeymatic pornoperception of the
Lad (Localised libido Andro-iD) than this ultra-detailed
microperceptive poring over - subordination to - the ice-
cold unyielding 'serpentine sleekness' mother of pearl
'high brow holy soul shimmering melancholy' of the Masoch/
Ferry Femodel. (And what happens when the Newtonian Model
speaks? Why the object becomes a femachine: Grace Jones,
the anorganic, anti-oedipal non-neurotic neurobotic body
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through which all of k-punk passes...)
Of course, Oliver's elegantly turned out Prada and Agent

Provacatuer sales assistants, catching moments amidst
urban business to smoke and look melancholy-beautiful, are
as much a part of the city's wildlife as the cormorants
and the herons haunting the Thames...
I made my first visit to London's necropolis of finance

with Oliver and Luke a while back... It now forms a
rhizome in my psychogeographic map of East London with the
nearby Mudchute farm (I was disturbed when I returned a
couple of weeks ago with Glueboot to discover that the
pigs were absent... though maybe they'd been taken inside
coz it was hot - pigs get surnburnt don't they? And there
were - though I can hardly believe this myself in
retrospect - llamas there that time... And Gb took a photo
of a cutely stupid-looking goat...) and Limehouse, whose
riverside 'historic pubs' are now a favourite haunt (when
Gb and I sat there on a respite from our punitive E London
walking regime, a passing boat sent a wave crashing
through the open window of the hostelry, drenching the
diners and their plates of food as they sat looking out
onto the Thames, so Turneresque vast and wide there, its
grey whiteness blending with the big sky)... Limehouse,
whose steampunk future-past - explored by Ackroyd in Dan
Leno and the Limehouse Golem and Dr Who in the Talons of
Weng-Chiang (itself intertextually entangled with Sax
Rohmer's Fu Manchu mythos [which was also absorbed into
the hyperfictional cosmos of Moore's League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen])...
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Fitting that the Draculine AD 1985 London version of

Gleamprog (Land: postmodern power is vampiric, it's dead
but it carries on) should have fed upon the rusting relics
of the docks... heronbone: 'i'm worried that there's plans
to do away with the sewer banks in this whole troubling
stratford city concept. the sewrbanks/greenway is a real
sanctuary, a refuge and i love it to bits. i'd hate to see
it go. i was reading in the paper a while back about how a
lot of the plants you see growing round there are
naturalised foreigners, from places as far afield as
siberia and sumatra which established themselves when
london still had working docks. (which is the most
romantic thing i can imagine, ships coming in the dock
from all 4 corners of the earth, imainging the men
stepping off those boats like odessyeus returned from
troy, superheroes with an air of magic about them, eyes
which had seen wonders, things perhaps only gods had seen
before)'
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Blissblog: "There are flows, but there are silt deposits;

a sedimentation builds up and takes on a character. The
whole history of London and especially East London
(hardcore/jungle/UKG’s heartland) is bound up with being a
port--the East End and the docks, the East End and
successive waves of immigration -- Jews, West Indians,
East Indians, etc. UKG has this odd combination of
insularity and a total open-ness to new influences; I’m
sure this must be connected to East London’s blend of
parochialism and hybridity, its ability to assimilate yet
retain a fierce local identity. UKG isn’t just the sum of
all the influences that flow through it. '
That's why Wiley's 'Ground Zero' - the 00's equivalent of

Foxx's 1980 London Alphaville elektrokosmetropolis,
Metamatic, the blackcockney neurobotic 'claustrophobic-
paranoiac' answer to the theatrobotic Euro-expansiveness
of Kraftwerk's 'Metropolis' and 'Neon Lights' - always
evokes for me not the twisted wreckage of the Twin Towers
but the superheated Gleamprog heart of darkness of
post-1980s UK-Kapital in the Wharf, where the Futures
market endlessly sucks the unlife from Now... 00's Kurtz-
Kapital-terminal opening up to an Outside not brought back
in great big clipper ships but through the loa-stalked
consensus hallucination of k-space...
(image stolen from Untimely)
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And of course, as Luke is well aware, the Gleamprog

fantasy of the London Olympic bid is part of the SF
Kapital retro-colonization of London's temporal lines of
flight, the uncared for, un-mission-statemented,
overgrown, uttunuloid intensive time zones where things
can still happen without being business-planned into
Kapital's always-deferred super-consummate bad
eschatology....
Prog rock never died, it turned into the Millennium

Dome... and then London 2012
Follow the link, look at Evil Nice Toneee's face.....

listen to his platitudes ('Good Writing' Luke lol')
SF Capital, 2001: 'The smooth transition from hippy to

hyper-capitalist, from slacker hedonism to
authoritarianism, from engagement to entertainment,
retrospectively reveals what the punks knew so well when
they cackled 'never trust a hippy'. Far from posing any
threat to capitalism, the dope-smoking, soap-dodging
rockers of the the 60s were acting as capital's reserve
army of exploiters, whose time spent at festivals and on
the experimental avant-garde did little or nothing to
engineer collective lines of escape, but yielded instead
resources for the new forms of enslavement that loom
everywhere around us now. Exactly like those likely to
have 'approved' of Kubrick's critique of corporate-
controlled environments in 1968 are now administering
their own 'total control' systems, all the more sinister
for their shirtsleeves informality, all the more
enveloping because the bosses wire themselves into the
circuit, flaunting their own self-exploitation as both
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inevitable and exemplary. As Deleuz-Guattari had it in

Anti-Oedipus, 'The bourgeois sets the example, he absorbs
surplus value for ends that ... have nothing to do with
his own enjoyment: more utterly enslaved than the lowest
of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous
machine, the beast of the reproduction of capital... 'I
too am a slave' - these are the new words spoken by the
master.'
For a chilling image of how SF Capital induces auto-

zombification in the master class, you only have to look
at the face of our glorious leader: that ashen carnival
mask, its grim, cheerless, Joker-grin flashing with ritual
efficiency, its blank eyes illuminated by empty
evangelism, darkened by perpetual irritation - the PM's
being run by Videodrome, and ... no-one owns Death TV.'
They are trying to turn London into a Roger Dean gatefold

sleeve.
Don't let it happen.
Oppose the bid.
Death to Videodrome...
Long unlive the Now Flesh...
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SEPTEMBER 29, 2004

I was sexually abused by a doctor when I was in my early

This same doctor had treated me for anxiety when I was 14

In any case, he is now in jail. The case received a great

Now, don't be too ready to comfort yourselves, sexualists.

Not at all. On the contrary, this episode helped me to see

Sex IS abuse. And if you think this is just one of my

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the fact that I have support from the most unexpected,

Kant believed that sex inevitably entailed treating the

Kant's view is much closer to the truth IMHO than those

I actually don't regard the abuse episode as that serious,

No doubt middle class people will be nonplussed by my

Obviously this doctor ultimately did me a favour my

It's interesting that one of the original meaning of the

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hyper-cold diagrams of an economic-social humiliation

'I give you money. You're superior. I don't exist. You

The genius of Gira was to deny that there was anything

Posted by mark at 11:00 PM | TrackBack

YOU'VE GOT ME GIRL ON THE RUNAROUND

In the best possible way, I couldn't disagree more with

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To say that Courtly Love is a version of the master-slave

Besides, it's odd to invoke Bataille in opposition to

Before I elaborate on that claim, a brief note on

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suppress now" concerning the – apparently endemic –

So, yes Catholics should be more guilty... not in that

Bataille is as much a part of the despicable Catholic

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destruction. Zizek has drawn our attention to Paul's

'The whole Courtly Love/ Glamasochism thing stinks of a

What then is this 'Act' of which the Sadeans (John and

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Act and eroticism; for the Masochist, the distinction is

It it is precisely this drive to relieve tension -

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So I would say that Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte are

Note also that Courtly Love does not involve 'worship of

Also, there is no need for glamasochism to share the

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Posted by mark at 07:20 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

SEPTEMBER 28, 2004

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The answer to John effay's typically stimulating response

Posted by mark at 01:58 AM | TrackBack

SEPTEMBER 26, 2004

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In answer to those who think that Glamasochism makes

It is not that I or other advocates of Glamasochists have

(A brief note here: yes, masochism is a perversion ---

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but, as Zizek rightly observes, it is the retrospectively

Paradoxically, in any case, the Ideal is the Real - the

'From a capricious and ironic sovereign Lady, she changes

Here we find the inescapable deadlock that defines the

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escape this deadlock is to reach out his hand towards the

We must be especially attentive here so that we do not

The contemporary degraded and coarsely sexualized version