eleutheria

Swept up on the beach

Does anyone know what these things are? They have been swept up a couple of times on our local beach, on the north coast, in the last couple of weeks. Is it possible they've deen dislodged by hurricane Ivan rough seas?

Minnie Cunningham - An early Cyber Feminist?

Reading an article in a book about Sickert, I found a description of Victorian music hall artist Minnie Cunningham (painted by Sickert) which sounded like it could have been written about a cyber-feminist woman of our era:

In the 1890s, a woman who was independent, whether actress, music-hall performer or political feminist, was categorised as a New Woman, a stereotype invented, satirised, discussed and ridiculed in the press. Minnie Cunningham was by definition a New Woman. Her earning power, her fanciful dress and make-up, the promise of prefessional success leading to a rich and glamourous lifestyle, all challenged conventional middle-class ideals of femininity. The identifying characteristics of the New Woman were tallness and thinness, a caricature whose origin lay in the reactionalry, pseudo-scientific theory that thinness was caused by genetic deficiency. Thus, lacking the full soft figure of the suposedly 'natural' woman, an unnatural sexuality was ascribed to the New Woman which destroyed her 'natural' biological urge to be a wife, mother and home maker.
Sickert 'Painter-in-Ordinary' to the Music-Hall, Anna Gruetzner Robins in Sickert Paintings

This was as much a caricature of these "New Women" then, as K-Punk's cyper femininist woman (personified in K-Punk by Grace Jones, the women of the photographs of Helmut Newton, and 'sad-eyed shop girls") is a caricature now. Minnie Cunningham said of Sickert's portrait of her, that he'd made her look "too tall and thin".

Truly existing beauty and sexuality is undermined for K-punk (and Helmut Newton), in favour of some additional manufactured ideal of beauty, never achievable in reality - only there for the camera. It is a miserable existence worshiping this unreal woman, when you could be involved in a passionate relationship with a REAL WOMAN. When you find beauty everywhere, life is lots better. I've even seen K-punk himself look beautiful: with bright eyes full of happiness and intelligence. I've never seen Bryan 'foxhunting' Ferry look like this.

The second "contradictory expectation": Beauty

(the first is Compassion)

A few quotes from Germaine Greer's The Whole Woman
to back up Glueboot's glamasochism post, with which I am in agreement.

...equality legistation could not give me the right to have broad hips or hairy thighs, to be at ease in my woman's body. Thirty years on femininity is still compulsory for women and has become an option for men, while genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity. Meanwhile the price of the small advances we have made towards sexual equality has been the denial of femaleness as any kind of a distinguishing character. If femaleness is not to be interpreted as inferiority, it is not to signify anything at all.

While western feminists were valiantly contending for a key to the executive washroom, the feminine stereotype was completing her conquest of the world.

If equality means entitlement to an equal share of the profits of economic tyranny, it is irreconcilable with liberation. Freedom in an unfree world is merely licence to exploit.

Wars nowadays are fought against civilians; the bulk of military casualties these days are women and children.

On every side we see women troubled, exhausted, mutilated, lonely, guilty, mocked by the headlined success of the few. The reality of women's lives is work, most of it unpaid and, what is worse, unappreciated ... yet every day we are told that there is nothing left to fight for. The old enemies, undefeated, have devised new strategies; new assailants lie in ambush. We have no choice but to turn and fight.

While women were struggling to live as responsible dignified adults, men have retreated into extravagantly masculinist fantasies and behaviours.

The sex of the millenium is pornography. Women are not the point of pornography. Pornography is the flight from woman, men's denial of sex as a medium of communication, the denial of sex as the basis for a relationship. ... The victims of pornography are men not women. ... [However] the substitution of masturbation for seduction means even more loneliness for heterosexual women, loneliness that is keenest within the embrace of a lover.

Every woman knows ... she cannot be beautiful enough. There must be bits of her which will not do. Even if all these are fine and flawless, she knows that within she has guts full of decomposing food; she has a vagina that smells and bleeds. She is human, not a goddess or an angel. However much body hair she has, it is too much. However little and sweetly she sweats, it is too much. Left to her own devices she is sure to smell bad. ... A woman who disported herself in a bikini out of which a bush of pubic hair sprouted would be regarded as a walking obscenity. No-one would say that the woman who puts herself through the agonizing ordeal of hot-waxing her bikini-line must be suffering from BDD

BDD is Body Dymorphic Disorder, abnormal preoccupation with a percieved defect in one's appearance. Greer quotes David Veale of the royal free hospital: '"These individuals are very socially handicapped. There is a high rate of depression and 25% have attempted suicide ... Micheal Jackson seems to be a clear case of BDD" What is pathological behaviour in a man is required of a woman. ... Such insecurity has been instilled into women over generations; we have made not the least headway in the struggle to dispel it'. Instead, it is being encouraged by commercial companies to sell beauty products.

Conditions that practically all women 'suffer from' are spoken of as unsightly and abnormal, to make women feel that parts of their bodies, perhaps their whole bodies, are defective and should be worked on, even surgically altered.

These sales tactics are now also being used on men (ie, optional femininity for men = more equality in an unfree world).

Preoccupation about her appearance goes some way towards ruining some part of every wonan's day. Multi-million dollar industries exploit both her need for reassurance and her need to do something about the way she looks.

Thirty years ago it was enough to look beautiful; now a woman has to have a tight, toned body, including her buttocks and thighs, so that she is good to touch, all over. 'Remember' she will be told, ' beauty starts from within'. Being beautiful from within takes even more time than slapping beauty on from without.

this process starts with young girls, and continues until old age.

It must be a sad world when what every mother wants for Mother's Day is 'younger-looking skin'. That is the one thing she is never going to have, not even if she endures all the agonies of a face-lift.

What is truly depressing about the false dawn of feminism is that, as we have been congratulating ourselves on largely imaginary victories, BDD has become a global pandemic [even, eg, women of provincial cities in China are being pushed into the Baywatch image of beauty]. ...

... Barbie with feet so tiny she cannot stand on them ... unattached career girl, woman's liberation in effigy ... is currently put together by 11,000 Chinese peasant women in two factories in Guangdong Province; 23p of the total price of a Barbie doll is payment for their labour.

... recognizing only one physical type as having any pretensions whatsoever to beauty.

Human, All Too Human

I've found it through google: http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/human1.htm
The quote is from Human, All Too Human

The logic of the dream.� When one sleeps, the nervous system is constantly excited by manifold internal stimuli: almost all the organs secrete and are active; the blood circulates turbulently; the position of the sleeper, his blankets, influence his feelings variously; the stomach digests and disturbs other organs with its movements; the intestines turn; the placement of the head occasions unusual positions of the muscles; the feet, without shoes, their soles not pressing on the floor, cause a feeling of unusualness, as does the different way the whole body is clothed after its daily change and variation, and all this excites by its unusualness the whole system, including the brain functions. Thus there are a hundred occasions for the mind to be surprised and to search for reasons for this excitation: the dream, however, is the searching for, and the imagining of, the causes for these excited feelings, i.e., the supposed causes. For example, if one ties two straps around one's feet, one may dream that two snakes are coiled around one's feet. This is at first a hypothesis, then a belief, accompanied by a pictorial idea and elaboration: "These snakes must be the cause of that feeling which I, the sleeper, am having"�thus judges the mind of the sleeper. What is thus inferred to have been the near past becomes the present through the excited imagination. Thus everybody knows from experience how quickly one blends a strong sound�e.g., the toiling of bells or cannon shots�into his dream, i.e., how he explains them ex post facto through his dream, in such a way that he supposes that he experiences first the causal circumstances and then this sound.

Of First and Last Things, 13.

Anti-revolutionary

[Most scholars and thinkers] imagine every necessity as a state of distress, as a painful compelled comformity and constraint; and thought itself they regard as something slow, hesitant, almost as toil and often as 'worthy of the sweat of the noble' - and not at all as soemthing easy, divine, and a closest relation of high spirits and the dance! ... Artists may here have a more subtle scent: they know only too well that it is precisely when they cease to act 'voluntarily' and do everything of necessity that their feeling of freedom, subtlety, fullness of power, creative placing, disposing, shaping reaches its height - in short, that necessity and 'freedom of will' are then one in them. In the last resort there exists an order of rank of states of soul with which the order of rank of problems accords; and the supreme problems repel without mercy everyone who ventures near them without being, through the elevation and power of his spirituality, predestined to their solution... . coarse feet may never tread such carpets: that has been seen to in the primal law of things; the doors remain shut against such importunates, though they may batter and shatter their heads against them! ... Many generations must have worked to prepare for the philosopher... ."

Beyond Good and Evil, We Scholars, 213

This links in with undercurrent's work on Bacon, freedom, chance. Progression by chance, but well bred chance - never man-made revolution which, to me, is a pretender to nihilism (as in the pro-capitalism theorist's attitude that once everything is destoyed, then we'll have some excitement; that revolutionary anti-human destruction is the only way forward. Deuleuze and Guattari misread, and used to shout at people "Don't stratify me, man!"). Give yourself up, but have 'control' at the same time: Bacon style.

Now I'll keep looking for that bit about sleep and body....

Ruth

First attempt to clear up a few issues.

"Therapy-monger despatched with the same Ruthless, sorry ruthless, efficiency as Arnie takes out the oedipeddlar... or leon takes out the blade runner... 'let me tell you about my mother....'"

Quoted from Mark's blog, taken from his list of people he has argued against, Socrates style, or rather shouted at until they give up.

I don't know what 'Therapy-monger' is meant to mean, but anyhow, I suppose he's talking about bringing Germaine Greer into play against the 'cyber female'? Mark implies that he has argued against me successfully, however, it's quite clear to me that he hasn't engaged in anything I've said (at least Socrates always does manage to do this, even in the most annoying way possible!). It's obviously impossible to have an argument in this case, as it's obvious there is going to be no resolution or giving way. I'm also not clear about what I am arguing against. My criticism of the content was not acceptable because I was not engaging with the theory behind it - but I am in still no way clear what the theory is, so can't argue against it.

I've been planning to write about Germaine Greer for ages now, anyway, so hopefully I will be able to steer some people in her direction and maybe show what is wrong with this idea that there is nothing further for women to "moan" about, because of the 'cyber female', and "even Sadie Plant says so". (Mark brings up cyberfeminism in his defence now after a decade of slagging off Sadie's work, of course)

I have only just started re-reading The Whole Woman, but would like to quote her a few times in what I have read so far. I do this for men, and but obviously, especially women because "A woman's first duty to herself is to survive this process [to be described in The Whole Woman], then to recognize it, then to take measures to defend herself against it."

"Post-Modernists are proud and pleased that gender now justifies fewer suppositions about an individual than ever before, but for women still wrestling with the same physical realities this new silence about their visceral experiences is the same old rapist's hand clamped ocross their mouths. Real women are being phased out; the first step, persuading them to deny their own existence, is almost complete."

"The future is female, we are told. Feminism has served its purpose and should now eff off. Feminism was long hair, dungarees and dangling errings; post-feminism was business suits, big hari and lipstick; post-post-feminsm was ostentatious sluttishness and disorderly behaviour."

"...the causes of female suffering can be grouped under the heading 'contradictory expectations'."

I will mention one of these expectations now - it is particularly relevant, and important to me because of my name: Caring.

"Women have historically been committed to caring; if they are now condemned to be uncaring can this be a liberation? Or should feminists establish the female principle of caring as a political principal? To do that would be to became that most absurd and outmoded of beings, a socialist... . Should we accept altruism as part of the psychological make-up of the whole woman, or should we politicize the principle of altruism on the grounds that it is no more than enlightened self-interest? We live in this world together and how we live together affects the way we live alone"

This is particularly pertinent, given that the example of one success - Grace Jones - is used to justify the position that 'everything's ok', (in the same way does Richard Branson's success justify the position that 'everything's ok' with capitalism - isn't that the opposite of mark's position?)

As undercurrent reminded me, Mark is not the the first person to imply that Ruthlessness, as well as ruthlessness is what is needed philosphically. I most certainly take exception to this. It was a devastating moment, aged 18, to be told this by the (then) well respected Nick Land. He did tell me to my face, though, and made no secret of his feeling towards me, which changed gradually into what I felt to be revulsion around the time of the CCRU. At first, his behaviour towards me was very playful - "penny for your thoughts", is something he once said to me, I swear!, so the change was clear.

Anyway, I was gutted by his analysis of my character, and took it to mean: destroy yourself: your love, your compassion disgusts me. Neither did I really understand where I was meant to start. I felt myself to be mentally very strong, and also ruthless, intellectually: ie, intelligent. At any rate, I began to engage with my name, and began to consider what it meant to me. Perhaps other girls with different names would not do this - to me, I am Ruth*. Luckily, this gave me strength against Nick's well-aimed assult on my personality. And it still gives me strength now, against the same from Mark's. These people who spit in the face of compassion don't realise how strong the compassionate need to be: to contain themselves, and persevere in fruitful ways. (See this at undercurrent).

In the early days of the CCRU formation at Warwick, I saw Mark coming out of a room in the Philosophy Department corridor. He looked so sad that I put my arms around him, an irrepressible urge to comfort him that overcame me. The worst accusation that can be made to me is that, like Nietzsche with his fallen horse, I am compassionate. At the other extreme attacking someone for falling short of your hopes, even when they are totally confident, is also an act of compassion, not sabotage.

I think compassion is crucial to think about, and that is why I have put the above Greer quotes in. Obviously, there is tonnes more thinking to be done - not only on compassion, which is closer to my heart than beauty, and the other important areas of interest Greer highlights - but got to start somewhere.

* I know this all sounds a bit, "but I'm Michelle, she's Shell, if she becomes me, then who am I??" wide eyed confusion from "Big Brother's Michelle", as she is known. But there we are.

Dictionary definition of Ruth (from the very useful dictionary.com site):
1) Compassion or pity for another.
2) Sorrow or misery about one's own misdeeds or flaws.

John Hillaby - Journey through Britain

John Hillaby's Journey through Britain, I recommend. "It is a beauty" (to quote Maurice Wiggin - Bookman)

Hillaby gets through the country at a stunning pace - the book reads very quickly indeed. Not really believing the walk from Lands End to St Ives could be done in a day, we walked to St Ives, from home, the other day (over land, avoiding the coastal path which wasn't so established 30 years ago, when the book was written), and realised it was possible, and a very pleasant walk. Our house is about half way along, and we walked the other way (to Lands End), a few days later. Over land, and avoiding main roads, this was not such fun. Like John Hillaby, I hate going back on myself, and won't retrace my footsteps unless absolutely necessary. As now seems inevitable on all new walks, to reach the destination where we lost the way, we walked through boggy paths and fields, climbing though trees in overgrown woods, over barbed wire and electric fences, and waist high in bracken, nettles and brambles. Leaving Sennen in the evening, we lost the path on the moor, but thankfully not my sense of direction, and finally got home around 12 midnight! Hillaby himself ended up stepping into waist high bog in the misty Dartmoor! Terrifying to all those of us who know practically anything is better than turning back, and could therefore (theoretically at least) be in this position ourselves.

"The fact that I went on is less foolhardy than it sounds. I tended to sink in if I stood still"

later in Scotland, more danger:

"Unwilling to go back, I struck inland, following a stream that took me up to the roof of the brae. How I got down by wading through a bog on the other side is painful even to recall.... And there was nothing ahead I could recognize. I had the feeling that I had strayed into an entirely unmapped, unknown corner of Inverness-shire."

I read the last 2 chapters with my toes tingling absolutely achingly, at the thought of him walking on with his "lost toe-nails"! (This is a familiar feeling to me. When B & V came to visit, we had a conversation about where you feel terror in your body [eg, if you are climbing rocks and lose your grip but don't fall]. I said I felt it in my feet, flooding upwards, and B said his father felt it in his groin, I think. B, where was your equiv? The feet isn't such a good place to feel these aches of fear, and confusion. It makes it difficult to keep your footing too. Thanks for your visit, by the way. We had a lovely time!)

Hillaby highlights something else that I have frequently observed; in a open space with plenty of places to chose from, people will often chose to camp (park, sit, etc, etc) right beside you, in the solitary spot you have chosen for yourself. He does this very funnily:

"Late that night, I got within five miles of Inchnadamph and looked for somewhere to sleep. A hillock beside a stream seemed pleasant enough, but the sight of one man putting up a tent drew first one caravan and then two more off the road. I had started yet another colony.

Unfortunately, I had chosen a very bad site. It hummed, not only with mosquitoes, but black-flies, a little needle-point-sized creature said to be responsible for the Highland fling. Hoping that the caravanners wouldn't think it downright unsociability on my part, I packed up and went higher up the braeside. They watched me go. I turned around and waved my hands, violently, trying to give the impression that I was swotting at flies, but at that distance it probably looked like an abusive gesture."

He has written 2 other books: Journey through Europe, and Journey to the Jade Sea.

John le Carre - Call for the Dead

John le Carre - Call for the Dead. In style, this is a cross between 3 of Carre's best books: Absolute Friends, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It describes the time that the George Smiley first came into the secret service.

If power = abuse of power - ie, if by having power, you are already an abuser - what name should be given to the unhypocritical personal strength carried into public life that Carre describes so well in George Smiley?

Here the Spinozist Smiley confronts real power:

"Abruptly [Smiley] felt inside himself the rising panic of frustration beyond endurance. With panic came an uncontrollable fury with this posturing sycophant, this obscene cissy with his greying hair and his reasonable smile."

Smiley's power makes 'success' impossible. Out of some impulse which is cultural/society-self-destructive but personally-self-strengthening, Smiley is unable to compromise. He confronts reality, and so his life is a constant confrontation.

"It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality." Virginia Woolf

le Carre captures how depressing (at best) it is when people you are forced to deal with are removed from reality, and therefore unable to be communicated with or criticised (the people for whose power = abuse of power eg, Tony Blair).

ps, has anyone else noticed the eery similarities between the film Fight Club and John le Carre's The Naive and Sentimental Lover? (Afraid I did buy Chuck Palahniuk's book Fight Club, but never bothered to read it, and then gave it away, so can't say if the likeness come from the book or not.)