For a little while now clinics offering cosmetic surgery have been advertising on the billboards of the tube, and high-spirited citizens have been defacing these adverts with stickers that say things like “don’t buy this SEXIST SHIT”. Which is all to the good. It’s a pity really that there’s no safe and effective form of penis enlargement surgery, because I think it would be salutary for men to have to endure the constant public insinuation that what’s really missing from their lives is a few extra inches of cock (“It’s all about confidence…knowing that you’ve got it where it matters…”). No doubt the day will come.

The latest sticker slogan I’ve noticed says “You are normal. This is not”. The implication here is that cosmetic surgery is about feeling that there’s something wrong with you that needs correcting, that you won’t ever fulfil your potential (a usefully vacuous expression) until you get the boobs God should have given you. The sticker’s urging you not to let yourself be made to feel that way, to accept and cherish your body as it is. Fine: but hypersexuality is not about being “normal”; it’s about positional advantage, standing out from the pack. I remember a conversation between two characters in a Love and Rockets strip where one was asking the other about his new girlfriend: “What’s she like? Is she smart?”…”Well, average, I guess”…”Average? Man, average is dumb”. Normal? Normal is unattractive, mediocre, undeserving of attention. Normal is a 5, and you need to be at least a 7.5 to be anything at all. Of course, it’s assumed that a standard of measurement exists. That is how competitive normativity works.

The trouble is, under the regime of competitive normativity you could pretty much use “you are normal – this is not” as the slogan for a car advert (the template: ordinary family guy takes wife and kids on mountainside adventure). I don’t imagine that Katie Price has ever been under the impression that it is “normal” to look like Jordan. She seems, rather, like someone who decided fairly early on that she deserved considerably better out of life than it looked like she was going to get. The core assumption of celebrity culture, which advertising reinforces, is that the purpose of life is to realize your fantasies: to become what you dream of being. We’re supposed to endorse this ambition wherever it arises, and whatever form it takes: to want something is to deserve it, and the proper role of others in one’s life-story is as enablers and facilitators in one’s journey towards success (although one remains personally responsible for the “hard work” needed in order to finally make it).

One of the tacit goals of education, “higher education” especially, is to seduce students away from their fantasies: to introduce the problem of truth into their psychic lives. In this way, the universities have largely taken over what used to be a function of religion – a neuroticising function, to be sure, but one which also constitutes a line of defence against the exploitation of media-conjured aspirations (what church people, gratingly to my ears, often call “materialism”). The role of churches and universities is not to act as enablers and facilitators in projects of fantasy-realisation, but to derail such projects with awkward questions. All too often, of course, they do so in order to bind the subjects they have thus disorientated to their own authoritarian vision of truth. But the authority that liberates you from fantasy thereby gives you the means to liberate yourself from authority: the freedom, that is, to never be normal again.

I identify a lot with Laurie Penny’s declaration, in a blog post from a while back, that “my writing… is the core of my being”, and appreciate her trenchant separation of “writing” from the supposedly feminine prerogative of “weav[ing]…stories out of our bodies”. It does raise the question, though, of what writing must be, if it can be both the core of someone’s being and separable from their daily bodily praxis, from what they do “just by living”. Writing is not just living. How is one to justify that conviction?

I think Penny is talking primarily about the focus of attention: what people see, what they are looking at, when they see something of yourself that you have made public. “I don’t want people who come to my blog to ‘come for the breasts’”, she says, even if “the breasts” are partly there to snare attention so that it can be drawn further in towards “the heart”. The body as a lure – as allure – is held out in a plea for further notice, an entreaty on behalf of something less tangible. There’s a kind of snub, a perhaps inevitable disappointment, when it’s taken to be “the point”, as if the heart were a useless accessory to an already complete commodity. “Objectification” is another name for this snub, this inattention to what really matters about a person.

It seems to me that both Laurie Penny and Katie West are concerned with bringing to light something of the “core” of who they are. The question that separates them, I think, is whether this “core” is continuous with one’s socially embedded and physically embodied selfhood, or something that only emerges through interruption. Does I write my flesh, or that which is “scored on my flesh”, that which marks me and separates me from my former self? Is “weaving” the most apt metaphor, or had one better speak of “inscription”?

It’s a strongly gendered question. The male body traditionally bears and displays its wounds – think of Coriolanus, scandalously refusing to publicise his scars. They are marks of action, signs of public engagement; a record of service. Something has happened to this body. Its story is the story of where it has been and what it has rubbed up against. The fingernails of the world have raked its back. By contrast, the airbrushing, soft-focusing and photoshopping of female bodies is a deliberate erasure of worldly contact, of experience. Fresh as a daisy is how you’re supposed to look, year after year, until you finally fall of the edge of the world and people start making vile comments about how wrinkled and haggard you are.

West asks, “Do women have to rebel against their own bodies, neglect their own bodies in order to be considered political?”, and I think one answer is that political rebellion does indeed engage a shift in priorities with respect to the body, which might very well look like “neglect” from the point of view of a culture that pays only a very specific sort of attention to the female body and its capabilities. We live, after all, in a society which is able to construe eating as neglect, as a lapse in the dietary discipline needed to maintain one’s body in its proper condition (this is called “letting yourself go”). Sometimes it is “political” to eat. The real object of rebellion here is not the body itself, but the interiorised social norms which dictate what kind of a concern my “own body” must be for me.

“Thrash funk”, of all things. Don’t remember much about these guys, except that the cover of this album disturbed me.

Recently I’ve been thinking more about the maxim Badiou puts forward in the Sarkozy book: that there is only one world. A world for Badiou is an existential situation; it is where we live and move and have our being. It is an order of appearance, a stage on which we (and everything else that appears and acts within our world) are players. It is also a panoply of myriad differences and identities, governed by a “transcendental” that rules over its logical coherence. Even sexual difference, finally, falls under the same transcendental as that which prescribes the differences between elements in the periodic table, insofar as these belong to the same world. Which is not to say that the difference between “masculine” and “feminine” is in any sense analogous to the difference between iron and potassium, but that it is not a different sort of difference, a more (or less) fundamental difference.

There is a consequence of this that I would call proto-feminist, which is simply that male and female persons are inhabitants of the same world. They have a common existential situation, and appear on the same stage together. Let’s include, since there’s no reason not to, persons whose sexual being is not completely specified by the terms “male” and “female” – and that might, to some degree, be all of us, whatever the force or seeming self-evidence of our identifications. This statement is “proto-“ feminist inasmuch as it makes way for feminism by forbidding the sexist division of men and women into separate worlds. It asserts the possibility of identification between people of different genders, even at the point where sexual difference seems most irrevocable and absolute. (In fact, the persistence in extremis of this possibility of identification is essential to what Badiou calls “love”, which is founded in the discovery, at the point of severance, of a common world).

Sexism installs a binary gender system, and insists that the coherence of the world depends on a systematic complementarity between the two sides of the division it has introduced. There is a male world, the real world, the domain of action and ideas; and there is the female world, its eternal subordinate, which materially sustains it, passively receiving its stamp. The schismatic feminism of the twentieth century aimed to undo the false totality of this world of two halves. At its extreme, it proposed a separation of the globe into male and female hemispheres, a complete cut along the join that made out of two distorted parts a mutilated whole. But this was only to have been the initial operation in a process of reconfiguration, which aimed in the long run at a creative andro-gyny: cut up and fold in.

I was also struck recently by the quotation from Michelle le Doeuff which appears at the head of Laurie Penny’s blog: “A feminist is a woman who does not allow anyone to think in her place”. This asserts that “a woman’s place”, wherever it might be in the distribution of places in the world, is by rights a place of thought; and that what feminism specifically forbids is the arrogation of this place by another, the dislocation of a woman from her own thinking. To assign to women a demi-monde without thought, a subordinate world that is the object of endless male speculation and enquiry (what do women want? How does one engineer female desire?), is the eternal insult of sexism. Feminism, in le Doeuff’s formulation here, is the repudiation of this insult: the assertion of every woman’s right to think in her own place.

There is an incentive to “game the system” wherever there is a system that acts as a gatekeeper, evaluating claimants for some reward and screening out those that fail to make the grade. Wherever there is privilege, there is cheating; wherever there is identity, there is performativity.

Consider again the case of the would-be “pick-up artist” (PUA). The assumptions governing his behaviour are as follows. Females act as gatekeepers for sex; they are comparatively choosy about their sexual partners, and select on the basis of a largely unconscious evaluation of “biological fitness”. This “fitness” is in turn signalled by status markers, which indicate a positional value: “alpha” and “beta” refer to a male’s current standing in the continual struggle for dominance among his peers. “Game” is a name for the praxis of male status-projection, which has to contend with opposition in two dimensions: a) “horizontally” from other males, who may try to out-game you (but who can also be useful foils for establishing your own superiority), and b) “vertically” from females, who will attempt to validate the status signals they are receiving, and will employ various countermeasures to detect and discourage bogus signalling.

There are two further assumptions involved. The first is that some males are just “natural” alphas: simply being who they are is “game” enough. The second is that false signalling provides a means for “natural” betas to obtain the rewards of alpha status. But, as in the old showbiz joke about sincerity (“…if you can fake that, you’ve got it made”), the ultimate goal of the PUA is to acquire “inner game”, a self-confidence initially acquired through enjoying the rewards of fakery that will alchemically transform his natural beta-ness into natural (or natural-enough-seeming) alpha-ness. The “natural” turns out to be interchangeable with the naturalised, with acquired interiority.

The hallmark of “inner game” is its immunity to female countermeasures intended to detect fakery: it is incorrigible and unimpeachable; perfectly smooth, offering no hooks for a hermeneutic of suspicion to latch on to. Every trace of the egregious beta-self has been vanquished and erased. This is a kind of sainthood, albeit the kind that happily coincides with lots of schtupping. Few indeed are they that rise to such a pitch of accomplishment.

The PUA’s is an admirably frank project of self-advancement, which provides a particularly lucid template or schema for “personal performativity” under late capitalism. In our society, an uneven distribution of rewards is justified by reference to the natural deservingness of the winners who enjoy the spoils: they, the golden few, are the truly talented, enterprising and industrious. It’s understood that the system works in such a way as to evaluate personal merit (in terms of market value) and reward it appropriately. At the same time, the promise made to the less fortunate many is that by working to achieve the appearance of merit, it is possible to appropriate and interiorise it.

As with the PUA, the seeker after social betterment must contend both with competition from his peers, whom he must out-perform in order to maintain his positional distinction, and with social barriers – spam filters – established to uphold the proper separation between the deserving and the undeserving. In order to pass as deserving he must resort to systematic guile, a cunning matched to the cunning of the system to which it is opposed. It will always be trying to suss him out: he mustn’t slip, or they’ll have him. It’s in this sense that our intuition is correct that the dire warnings on posters threatening the perpetrators of “benefit fraud” with imminent discovery are addressed to all of us, as subjects-supposed-to-fake-it. The biggest fraud of all is the one who has learned how to stop feeling guilty about it.

What does the “hyper-“ in “hyper-sexualised” denote? (Compare “raunchy”, or “pornified”). An unnatural emphasis, inscribed IN CAPITALS; an immodestly enhanced visibility, like that of a neon sign blinking “girls…girls…girls…”. Altogether too much. The hyper-sexual phreaks the mechanisms of sexual attention, drawing it where it would not ordinarily be expected to go (towards children, for example). It’s about being looked at, but trivially so: built into it is the recognition that you’re already being looked at, all the time; that the gaze that appraises you works in certain predictable ways, and can be distracted. Think of it as a sort of street magic.

The inauthenticity of the hyper-sexual is entirely to the purpose: to be authentic is to be evaluated, and perhaps summarily dismissed, on the onlooker’s own terms. The hyper-sexual routine sows deliberate confusion. But it does so in competition with dozens of other routines, all targeting the same mark. From the mark’s point of view, the cumulative effect may well be like that of an inbox full of spam.

The male counterpart of heightened female sexual display is the routine put down by the would-be pick-up artist (PUA), who is similarly attempting to phreak the mechanisms of sexual attention in order to get somewhere his native charm and good looks wouldn’t normally enable him to go. Built into this behaviour is the assumption that everything you do or say, from explicit verbal statements to the gestural code of body language, is being used to assess your status (life really is one long performance review to these guys). Again, the goal is misdirection, and the height of accomplishment is to succeed in fooling even yourself: “inner game”, the seamless integration of the status value advertised by the PUA’s routines into his self-perception and consequent social behaviour, is the direct male correlate of “inner beauty” for women.

Attempts to game the system reveal two things: firstly, that some actual system is perceived to be in operation, and secondly that the system is understood to work predictably enough to be amenable to subversion. The PUAs talk about “biomechanics”, meaning a hodge-podge of second hand evo-psycho dressing up an even shabbier hodge-podge of old-fashioned sexist stereotypes. The instructions given to women on how to make the most of themselves are scarcely any less atavistic or incoherent. But these desolate, derisory projections are the very substance of the symbolic contract: that is how the world really works. Not, as everyone secretly believes, because people are bloody ignorant apes, but because of the reflexive self-validation of symbolic rules. We assign status to men based on their demonstrated prowess at playing idiotic status games, since this at least is some sort of achievement. We confer desirability on women who pout and act hot, even though the act itself is ludicrous, since this at least shows willing.

In one sense, then, female hypersexuality can be characterised as “making the best of a bad job”: since women are ubiquitously judged and valued on their looks – since there is a system of continuous appraisal in place – the incentive exists to game the system, to hustle for recognition. The PUA’s defensive mantra, “don’t hate the player, hate the game”, proclaims an identical rationale: since “biomechanics” purports to make sense of the apparent “chaos” of sexual selection, it’s only fair for a second-rater to use this knowledge to get himself an even break. In both cases, there’s a kind of reflexive impotence at work: nobody really wants things to work this way, it’s just accepted as natural and inevitable that they should do so, and this acceptance incentivises patterns of behaviour that, in turn, reinforce the very conditions to which they are a response.

This being so, shouldn’t the player be compelled to accept some responsibility for the game – at the very least, to recognise that the “system” cannot function without his co-operation, and to consider ways in which that co-operation might be strategically withdrawn? I want to suggest in this regard that there was after all some value in the “political lesbian” feminist challenge, now generally considered intolerable, to politically committed women involved in heterosexual relationships. The point here is not that heterosexual relationships are intrinsically bad, and lesbian relationships are intrinsically better: it is that heteronormativity is reflexively self-sustaining, and “making the best of a bad job” with respect to compulsory heterosexuality is already a political choice for which one should be prepared to answer. Recent feminism has argued forcefully that women should never be criticised for doing what they have to do to get by in a sexist society, frequently implying that such criticism usually comes from a privileged position where the necessity of getting by is less keenly felt. It’s a just and fair-minded argument to make (and, pragmatically, rules out a lot of petty judgemental sniping); but something is lost if one is no longer able to issue or accept any kind of challenge to one’s rationalisations for passivity.

See this? It’s awesome. And Spiral Jacobs’s Prolegomenon will be on it soon.

Not always sure whether or not I like Joanna Newsom, but I do like this:

and this, for that matter:

Reminds me a bit of ISB, especially the Dolly Collins arrangements on The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.

Still, there are anomalies in this moral crusade being waged in the precincts of Iowa and the purlieus of New Hampshire. The mood of triumphalism that surrounds Pat Robertson’s campaign is curious in that most of Robertson’s evangelical followers still claim to be premillenialists – that is, they expect the imminent return of Christ and the judgement of a sinful world – but they are acting increasingly like postmillenialists who have taken it upon themselves to usher in Christ’s millenial kingdom. Indeed, there are many evangelicals whose premillenial scruples still will not allow them to participate in politics. In the course of our conversations, Keith Marsh recounted an argument that Robertson faced at the pastors’ luncheon in Concord as he was deciding whether to run for president. “Wait a minute”, one of the ministers said. “The next event on the eschatological clock is the return of Christ. Things in society should get worse rather than better. If Christians worked to turn our nation around, that would be a humanistic effort and delay Christ’s return.”

Balmer, R., Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory: A Journey Into The Evangelical Subculture In America (New York: OUP, 1993), p. 173.

This I think deserves to be more widely known:

Neoliberalism as Water Balloon from Tim McCaskell on Vimeo.

via our Polish comrade nuitsansnuit

A common way of looking historically at feminism is to regard it as a “movement” which has rolled out in “waves”: the first wave would be the 19^th and early-20^th century push for women’s emancipation and suffrage, the second would be the “women’s lib” of the 60s and 70s, and the third would be the diversified or “postmodern” feminism of the late-20^th and early 21^st centuries. People are now starting to talk of a “fourth wave”, although they seem to mean very different things by it.

I’d like to suggest a different metaphor, adapted from Badiou. My suggestion is that we regard feminism as a series of discrete political “sequences”, separate periods of insurrection which have kicked off, flared up, fanned out and eventually exhausted or “saturated” themselves. The significant difference is that, according to Badiou, “a political sequence does not terminate or come to an end because of external causes, or contradictions between its essence and its means, but through the strictly immanent effect of its capacities being exhausted…There is no failure, there is termination”. While a “wave” might roll on until it crashes against the rocks, or meets with external resistance that quells its forward motion, a “sequence” generates impasses that are immanent to its own unfolding: problems of its own making, that arise from its entanglement with the real. Each sequence therefore creates problems that it is not able to resolve on its own terms, problems that are left for a later sequence to take up and work over in a new way.

Radical feminism, the feminism of the second sequence, met with a backlash (the term is Susan Faludi’s) which coincided with the neo-liberal restoration of the 1980s (Thatcherism, Reaganism) and which involved a re-naturalisation of sexist power relations and a denial that the problems encountered by the radfems of the 1970s were after all real problems. The issues that the radfems had tried to confront on the terrain of the real were scorned as “abstract”, the exclusive concern of “idealists” and those with their heads in the clouds. The failure of the radfems to resolve these issues was held up as proof that they were unresolvable “in practice”, and that it was (and always had been) a waste of time trying to do anything about them. That part of its program which was achievable, radical feminism was held (bar a certain amount of post-historical mopping-up) to have achieved; that which it did not achieve was held to be unachievable.

It has sometimes seemed as if third-wave feminism’s response to the exhaustion of the second sequence, and the cultural pressures of the anti-feminist backlash, has been to try to dissolve the specifically feminist problematic (what is to be done about male dominance and sexism?) into generic identity politics (how do we obtain recognition for minorities?) and human rights discourse (how do we protect vulnerable bodies from abuse?). This move has ensured that third-wave feminism has always had more to do (since there are always more minorities – flavour of the month at the moment seems to be transsexuals – and there are always more categories of abuse) without compelling it to address the unsolved problems of the second sequence. The question is: besides putting up a sometimes rather hesitant defence before the right-wing Kulturkampf against progressive notions, has third-wave feminism been able to develop a political sequence of its own?

Consider the following term of art of third-wave feminism: “intersectionality”, or awareness of the ways in which gender intersects with race and class (amongst other things). Intersectionality concerns the topology of oppression: its localisation in experience, and in the unions and intersections of regions of experience. Because oppression is distributed across several overlapping regions (race, class, gender), it joins together in experience that which is separate in name: identitarian categories combine and conflict in the life-histories of persons, whose misfortunes are generally multiple. An articulated oppression admits of an articulated resistance, and it is in this articulation that the political creativity of intersectionality is claimed to consist.

In the work of bell hooks, for example, the union and intersection of minorities gives rise to something like a universal subject of oppression, a “we” oppressed from every angle. This subject includes, in the final analysis, even the privileged, whose privilege limits their capacity for empathic and political identification with others and restricts the realisation of their full (social) humanity. The “global set” of the oppressed is by this token also the set of oppressors (as the oppressed in their turn perpetuate oppression): it encompasses the entire structure of oppression, in its topological distribution. Civil rights struggles may modify this structure from within, for instance by challenging the concentration of power in the hands of elites, but inequality remains the law of the system, the invariant rule of its consistency. The ultimate political horizon of hooks’s analysis is the global undoing of this consistency, the revolutionary restructuring of society at the level of its fundamental logic. But it is not clear how intersectionality can offer more than a situational analysis to the task of bringing about this transformation, which calls for a political subject capable of detaching itself from the multiple sites of its oppression and establishing a claim to existence in its own right. (“Speaking as a communist…”)

The second sequence of feminism was schismatic and antagonistic: it belonged to the century of division, of “one splits into two”. Cutting along the dividing line between the sexes, it aimed at undoing the “coherence in contradiction” of the gender system. Separatism, the securing of more or less autonomous spaces for women’s political development, was the pre-eminent sign of this scission, whether in “consciousness-raising” groups, publishing houses dedicated to the circulation of women’s writing or the communal experiments of political lesbianism. “Women without men”, liberated from material and psychological dependency on their supposed male counterparts, would come to know themselves as self-reliant political agents capable of understanding and articulating their own needs and desires. The goal of this separation was the creation of a gendered political will capable of measuring up to the facts of sexism and male domination.

Second wave feminism knew that it loathed the (mutual, yet asymmetrical) exploitation coded into conventional heterosexuality, knew that the sexual encounter had the potential to degrade as well as to gratify, and yet held to a profoundly hopeful vision of equality and freedom in which sex was neither bartered (for money, esteem or security) nor practised as predation. The attempt to realise that vision crashed and burned, but it did so for complex (immanent) reasons: in particular it foundered on the polymorphous character of desire, for example the inevitable infiltration of a “masculine” component into even the most “woman-centred” sexual identification. Radical feminism did not always grasp that the construction of sexual integrity is necessarily a creative process, rather than the recovery of a lost or occluded essence.

It may be that “pro-sex” third-wave feminists have had a more hopeful story to tell about the dialectic of sexual integrity and political agency, seeing the confabulation of a viable sexual selfhood as part and parcel of a wider project of individual “empowerment”. Certainly this story has a plausible villain: the religious right, phobic about female self-actualisation in sex, demonstrates a malicious determination to miseducate young women, filling their heads with dire prohibitions and imaginary terrors. Happily, all that is needed to defeat this stupefying knavery is a program of counter-education, disseminating awareness of the biological normality of sex coupled with a few good feminist homilies about the importance of maintaining a healthy self-esteem. It’s a popular message. But it hasn’t a lot to say about the inveterate abnormality of desire, its utter indifference to the imperatives of healthy ego-maintenance, the genuine irresponsibility which enables it to lend its potency to cruelty and destruction as readily as to creativity and loving kindness.

I’d like to digress a little here and think for a moment about why sexual “purity” has become so important to right-wing US Christians. Why have shame and moralistic finger-wagging about sex become such a significant aspect of their public rhetoric? Purity ethics have remarkably little to do with Christianity as I understand it, which is essentially concerned with the quality of care in human relationships: what the life and ministry of the Jesus presented in the Gospels are about, to a first approximation, is demonstrating that human wholeness is not accomplished by purging “unclean” elements from self and society, but by acting so as to realize justice and mercy in one’s relationships with others. A truly Christian sexual ethic would accordingly pay close attention to the practices and processes through which sexual agency and integrity are built up in these relationships, and would tend to abhor the invasive and exploitative use of sex to satisfy individual egotism – or to shore up hierarchical power relations.

It may be that the religious right is terrified by the apparently rampant egotism of our sexual culture, but its response to this terror is to fall into the mirroring sin of using sexual control (idealisation of purity together with a shaming and punitive attitude towards transgression) to preserve traditional power structures. What presents itself in the confrontation between Jessica Valenti’s paeans to self-pleasuring individual empowerment and the ghastly patriarchal kitsch of purity balls and silver ring things is the unedifying spectacle of two idolatries clashing blindly in the night, their antagonism decaying steadily into symbiosis.

In my view, the unresolved problems of the second sequence of feminism have yet to be taken up: for its part third wave feminism has yet to produce an impasse of equal urgency or intractability. It may be that it is simply too early to discern the political sequence that has been working its way through third wave thought and practice all along, and that eventually it will make itself known to everybody: we will suddenly see that the feminism of the past thirty years has after all succeeded in taking hold of a few points, and has brought about a new subjective configuration in spite of every temptation laid in its path. This new configuration will be known by its enemies, of whom I would make only one prediction: they will not denounce it from the pulpits of megachurches in archaic theological language, but through the mass media in the language familiar to popularisers of every cause. The rhetoric of reaction will not be that of dogmatic religious certainty, but that of commonsense opinion: what everybody knows. Whatever else it may be, it is certain to be accessible.

A couple of years ago the Guardian published an article of Jessica Valenti’s of memorably annoying vacuity – I distinctly recollect muttering “oh, for fuck’s sake” to myself whilst reading it, the way I used to with everything of Tanya Gold’s until she unexpectedly turned quite good. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Trust me on this one – when you’re a feminist, day-to-day life is better. You make better decisions. You have better sex. I have a job that I love that I owe to feminism (as a writer and one of the founders of feministing.com). I have an amazing group of women friends who spend their days speaking out against sexist idiocy – and who also happily dance their asses off with me when we’re out clubbing. Where criticisms about my loud, opinionated ways might bother me if I wasn’t a feminist, the fact that I am means that I know that there’s nothing wrong with me, but only with a world that doesn’t want women to speak their minds. And I have better relationships. In fact, as I was getting ready for the photoshoot for this article, the guy I’m dating (who also calls himself a feminist) tidied up for me so the photographer wouldn’t see what a tip my apartment is at the weekends. Would my pre-feminist boyfriends have done that? I don’t think so.

I find it difficult to imagine ever being friends with anyone who didn’t find this unbearable. Much of the difficulty comes from not knowing how I could ever explain why I myself found it unbearable to someone who didn’t just automatically get it. The passage above is so demoralisingly PR-perky as to sap almost all the energy required to make the transition from sub-vocalised impatience to coruscating retort.

Fortunately, IT thought it worth the (heroic) necessary effort; and her One-Dimensional Woman does a fine job of reading Valenti’s fatuous advertising copy as an ideological symptom, a sign of the times. Valenti’s response demonstrates perfectly the hostility to thought, the pre-emptive smothering of imagination, that shields the reality-system with which her putative feminism seeks to accommodate itself. Accusations of “elitism” are not only the last but also, invariably, the immediate resort of those who have accepted the capitalist injunction to “live without ideas” (as Badiou puts it). No further argument will ever be produced.

“Elitists” are those whose thought is abstract because it is concerned with the deadly abstractions which dominate our lives, and because it aims at a future incompatible with our dominated present. In point of fact, Nina’s writing is far more urgently and hectically involved with the “bodies and languages” of our common world than the most lavishly anecdotal self-help book; but it also, as Natalie Hanman rightly identifies, turns the intense focus of the “theoretical lens” on that world, in order to burn a hole through its apparent self-evidence and inevitability. This is the task of an “elite” from which everyone is equally excluded by the demand that we remain without ideas: an “elite” that already includes all of us insofar as we are capable of participating in thought.

A lovely morning – I walked to the railway station through a grey, becalmed, snow-powdered Northampton, the roads quiet and few pedestrians on the pavements. Fine snow still coming down constantly, almost no wind. I was warm and sure-footed in my fleece and boots. Later in the train I started idly stringing together fragments of baroque counterpoint in my head, the way I sometimes used to do as I fell asleep in the evening, mentally perambulating around the cycle of fifths. I haven’t felt this calm and alert in a while. Herr, unser Herrscher!

Did it snow when I was in Cardiff? I seem to remember that it did, but don’t quite trust the memory. I remember Anne with her licorice cigarette papers, tall, quizzical and sardonic. My friend Gerald said that she was beautiful, and I had to think about it before I saw that he was right: a shift in the balance of the world. Fastidious, self-shielding loneliness made me a dead loss around women, whom I let down repeatedly in smaller and greater ways. Valuing someone is an activity as much as a disposition: showing that you care, a form of affective labour. If there’s one thing I need to learn in my life, it’s that this is not superfluous. But I don’t feel that I understand the code, which sometimes seems to me to be a women’s language spoken by only a few male initiates; and some of what it can be used to say is subtly de-valuing, or works to reinforce social hierarchy. I doubt I’ll ever stop being surprised by the things women can feel slighted by, or mystified by their anger with each other.

There’s an occasional virtue, perhaps, in “emotional illiteracy” (or what I sometimes like to think of as “sense and reason”). At least, like “selective deafness”, it should be recognised as a social tactic. One of my favourite lines from The Simpsons is Homer’s comment on the break-up of Millhouse’s* parents’ marriage: “The problem is communication – too much communication”. There’s a tendency now to pluralise “literacy”: to speak of “literacies”, familiarities with various protocols. Knowing how to play video-games is different from knowing how to use a Biblical concordance, for example. Presumably one can also pluralise “illiteracy”, and speak of the tactical value of different illiteracies. What is the value of not knowing how to operate the user interface of Microsoft Word? A certain independence from the machine and its (proprietory) software: you remain plugged into the social (asking people for help) instead of letting your habits be modified by the technology so that other people become less necessary (in proportion as the technology itself becomes more necessary). What is the value in not recognising that someone’s ostensibly factual statement is in fact meant to communicate their emotional frustration, in not knowing that the proper response is to address that frustration rather than to focus on the factual validity of the statement? Independence from the affective circuits that produce, on the one hand, warm and sustaining sociality and, on the other, vicious and resentful emotional antagonism.

* Typo/slip corrected: this originally read “Millbank’s”.

via Stuart Maconie’s often informative Freak Zone, this is what Clive Palmer did after getting back from his travels in India and deciding not to rejoin the Incredible String Band – Wade in the Water by C.O.B.(Clive’s Original Band):

Where do those harmonies come from? They’re instantly recognisable as belonging to the same lineage as ISB’s, particularly in the use of inverted pedal tones. Here’s some more – Serpents Kiss, which sounds a bit like one of the woozier moments from The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter:

This one is rather lovely, too – Let it be You, from 1972’s Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart, which again wouldn’t have sounded too out of place on Wee Tam:

But our minds are polarized by artificial debates in which we are enjoined to take sides: for or against surrogate motherhood, for or against the scarf, for or against prostitution. The question is not to know if a woman’s consent is real or not when she prostitutes herself. To question the subject behind the prostitute or the woman who wears a scarf is a form of class contempt. The real question is whether consent is a political argument. And to that I say: no! I cannot think correctly in politics without having first carried out an epistemological investigation: with what tools, what arguments do we think?

Geneviève Fraisse, in interview. I like very much her “no!” here. She has written a book on the subject of consent, which addresses such questions as whether individual acts or dispositions of consent can be joined together so as to amount to collective consent or will, and what the value of “choice” can be when it is a choice between forms of domination, but I don’t know what her conclusions are.

They’re good questions though. I think that framing the question as one of the possibility of linking a subjective disposition to a political argument is a suggestive approach to take – but also, mightn’t the link run in the other direction, such that to be won over to an argument or a political position is then to move towards assenting to the consequences that follow from it?

In Logics of Worlds, an “object” is the “objectivation” – the projection into some world – of a multiple-being (a “thing”). What’s interesting about this projection is that it conserves the multiple composition of the thing projected: there is a correspondence between the “elements” of the multiple and the “atoms” of the object, such that every atom is a “real” atom. Another way of saying this is to say that every difference (in the projected components of the enworlded object) indexes a difference (in the multiple composition of the thing in itself): this is the import of Badiou’s “materialist postulate”, which we might translate colloquially as “there’s no (phenomenal) smoke without (ontological) fire”. Objects are not phantoms, not subjective illusions in some free-floating phenomenal realm, but the worldly-being of real beings. Yet another way of saying this is to say that the “chairness of a chair” (for example) does not consist entirely of such worldly attributes as woodenness or four-leggedness or ergonomic suitability for sitting on: the “chair-thing” of which the chair-object is the worldly projection forms the indispensable support for the chair-object’s discernible components.

In his funeral oration for Jean Hyppolite (collected in Pocket Pantheon), Badiou recalls that during his entrance examination for the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Hypollite, who was his examiner, asked him what the difference was between a thing (chose) and an object (objet):

I improvised an answer. And I have to say that, having worked in recent years, and with great difficulty, on the notion of an object, I still bear that warning in mind. I fear that, even today, I still confuse the two.

From Theory of the Subject, which opens with a consideration of the dialectic of force and placement, through the treatment in Being and Event of the excess of representation over presentation, to Logics of Worlds and the topic of “being-there”, the distinction between the thing-in-itself (chose) and the thing-in-its-place (objet) is a recurring concern of Badiou’s. To give it a simple, if slightly gnomic, formula: the thing in-sists, but the object ex-sists.

In Being and Event, a “thing” is simply a “being”, a multiple counted-as-one. The role of “object” or thing-in-its-place is filled by discursive objects, referents of encyclopedic predications. There are thus two ways in which a “situation” is structured: as a multiple of multiples, a thing composed of things, and as a system of referents classified and named through some predicative language which enables the discrimination of “parts” of the multiple. The power of the “event” is that it presents some chose as causa sui, and so initiates the composition of a new multiple (the “generic extension” woven from the elements of the situation) which has no place in the existing system of names. The event disarranges the familiar furniture of the world: it reveals that the contents of our “Latour litanies” of nameable parts of reality are provisional, that the true multiple-composition of a situation is neither dependent on language nor restricted to that which is able to be said.

This is not quite the same – nota bene – as saying that “objects” are arbitrarily carved (or autopoetically self-stabilised) out of some pre-objectal flux of becoming. The point here is that Badiou’s “mathematical ontology” gives us a picture of a “situation” that is not only intricately structured (being a multiple-of-multiples, to any degree of recursive depth you like*), but structured in such a way (or to such a degree) that the resources of its own language are unable to discriminate every part of it. No catalogue of objects capable of being compiled using the language of a situation can ever exhaust the multiple-being of the situation itself. But this does entail that an “object” be considered solely as the referent of an entry in such a catalogue.

The story changes significantly in Logics of Worlds, which I’ll come to next: there, the “being-there” of the object is decoupled from language, but attached instead to the “transcendental” which governs relations of identity and difference between objects. The object is no longer considered primarily as a referent pinpointed within a system of names, but it remains in a precarious relationship to the pure “thing” which still – through the mediation of the event – has the power to disturb its worldly co-ordinates.

* unless you like violating the axiom of foundation.

Some pretty bits I ripped off from Martin Simpson. In CGCGCD.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my cloak and fangs
had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Philip Larkin, A Study of Reading Habits

I’m struck by the ways in which recent discussion of Cornel West seems to turn on who he’s supposed to be (particularly as an academic) and the evident incompatibility of his own-funky-trumpet-blowing persona with this imago. I rather admire what West seems to be doing here. It’s more humble than you might think to expose yourself to ridicule in the way he has, to make your own innate ridiculousness part of a performance which also aims at the sublime. Self-regard always looks preposterous when its content (the things one believes or would like to believe about oneself; the stories one tells oneself about one’s origins and travails) is spoken out loud; and nobody learns better than academics the social necessity of caution in affirming one’s own shameful person. The great trombone-slides of West’s monologue (in reality a voicing of several traditions of self-revealing public speech) are a careless and impudent interruption of all the habits of discretion and politeness by which what West calls “the funk” gets cleaned up and shunted out of view. No doubt he makes himself look an absolute tit, but I really like him for trying it on.