This piece, by Tristram Hunt, tells you exactly what is wrong with the way the British Library is run at the moment. The only good thing about the current situation is the fact that more people seem to be dozily leaving pound coins in the lockers when they leave. I made £3 the other day just by walking down one of aisles.

The very worst thing about the BL I think is the wireless-access Canary-Wharf strip, populated by business knobs checking their email or whatever, and glancing up at you as you as you go to the reading room to like, you know, actually read some books or something. What are they doing there?! Get out you overpaid buffons! And take your poncy VAIO's with you before I stamp on your Blackberrys and make you 'wireless' with rage!

Actually, the very worst thing is the unbelivably overpriced and absolutely disgusting cafe and restaurant. I try and bring a packed lunch because having to pay for anything puts you in such a foul mood that getting back into work becomes hard. If you can find a seat, that is...grumble, grumble...

[image courtesy of Myles Sullivan].

Thanks to everyone for some excellent correspondence - it will all be integrated and referenced in future pieces...the monkey-robots will rise again...

From owen:

'Wierdly, (and you knew I was going to say this) the 1933 Kong is one of the most Modernist films made in Hollywood in the 30s. No other film of the period, certainly not the more ‘acceptable’ modernistic filmmaking of someone like King Vidor or Orson Welles, makes such gleeful use of technology. By essentially having the film revolve around the antics of a giant gorilla, it can revel in skyscrapers, sending the unfortunate simian up them, violating their privacy by peeking into the bedrooms; can show off military technology, with its machine-gun equipped fighter planes, circling around Kong like the dodgier products of Italian Futurism. All this ostentatious progress can only be celebrated by setting it against earlier stages of evolution - something that can also be seen in the outrageously racist first half of the film.
Also, Ray Harryhausen’s special effects kind of work as a ‘bastard Brechtian’ to go along with the bastard Modernism. Impressive as they are, even the eye of 1933 would have been able to see the joins, the gaps and the sleights of hand. It’s like a kind of special effect that doesn’t rely on illusionism...viz too the framing devices - this is all taking place for the sake of a movie, of course. Also the sex thing is deeply odd and impressively so for the time - Fay Wray’s character is presented as a bit of a slapper, a shoplifter picked up randomly on Broadway, fit only for having her clothes torn off in little strips by the grandiose monkey, as happens in one particularly rum scene. Anyway moral of this = giant primates have symbiotic relation to technology.'

Just a round up of some of the splendid links that spiralled out of the monkey theme:

interbreeding on interbreeding, discussion on jodi dean's site, including a woman-dolphin coupling care of Padraig, Cephalopod love, care of Holophurnocio, dominic's gorilla dream from a while back, monkey computer games, also care of Padraig (cf. also the Monkey Island series, Black and White, Donkey Kong, etc.)

Notes for future continuation of monkey scratchings: 2001 (the film), Ilya Ivanov's attempts to crossbreed humans and (other!) apes in the 1920s, monkeys being tried in courts of law (including the Hartlepool monkey), monkeys in space, other inhuman couplings...and that robot/android/cyborg question...

why our enemy's enemy is not a friend or why Bono would do well to reinvent himself as a giggling elfin cartoon character.

In the wake of the monkey syntax story, the ancient human/early monkey sex revelation, the ongoing monkey/robot hypothetical question, and several great contributions from readers (especially Dominic Fox/Padraig), a pictorial reflection on monkeys, men, women, robots.

1. the monkey-robot sans human



[This painting is by Eric Claridge, who also used to be in a band that I like called 'The Sea and Cake' (oddly enough, I named my school's literary magazine after them). Anyway, now he also paints these splendidly weird animal pieces.]

The monkey-robot coupling without human mediation (taking at face value for a moment the generalising claim that women pick monkeys over robots and men robots over monkeys) is expressed by Zizek thus (thanks to Padraig for the quote): "What Lynch does [in Lost Highway] by staging inconsistent fantasies together, at the same level, is, in the terms of Hoeg's novel [The Woman and the Ape], something akin to confronting us with the unbearable scene of the "ideal couple" underlying this novel, the scene of a male ape copulating with a female cyborg." Further, that 'Peter Hoeg's novel stages sex with an animal as a fantasy of full sexual relationship, and it is crucial that this animal is, as a rule, male: in contrast to the cyborg-sex fantasy, in which the cyborg is, as a rule. a woman, i.e. in which the fantasy is that of Woman-Machine (From Blade Runner to Nip/Tuck).



But, Padraig continues: 'Does this not materialize two standard vulgar notions: that of a woman who wants a strong animal partner [masculine purity myth], a "beast," not a hysterical impotent weakling, and that of a man who wants his feminine partner to be a perfectly programmed doll meeting all his wishes [feminine purity myth], not an effective living being.'

As k-punk put it a while back re the second point: 'The more disturbing thought is that men would always in practice prefer a robot to an actual woman - and this is why the libidinal economics, if not yet the technical feasibility, of The Stepford Wives are horribly credible.'



It certainly looks as if the monkey-robot union fuses two poles of clichéd desire whilst evacuating the, ahem, 'primate scene' of the typically hairless fleshy bearers of these fantasies. Whilst there is certainly much to be said for the 'masculine purity myth', the delirious female capture at the hands of a man overcome by animality, two pieces of recent research point to an odd paradox at the heart of this fantasy. First, the news that women's judgments of men's facial masculinity accurately reflect men's testosterone levels. Women appear to be attracted to men with high levels of testosterone for short-term relationships and nothing more. Testosterone, of course, is responsible for the growth of body hair, beard growth, deep voice, development of the penis, aggressiveness, sexual behavior - In other words, those things that make men into something approximating a randy gorilla - a rumble in the jungle but not a suitable papa for the little ones...



But depictions of the woman-simian mutual attraction are nothing new of course (indeed, an appropriately-sized monkey might provide a useful, if unconventional, practice-partner without risk of pregnancy - at least not for the past 5.4 million years if new reports are anything to go by, ha - though not of disease of course, though the mutation of a certain monkey virus into HIV in humans is more likely to have come from eating 'bush meat' than bestiality).



So - overtly 'monkeyish' men are not the most 'useful' of sexual partners (if we take the cheap cultural evolutionary point for a second). Second is the not-entirely-unrelated story that women fancy artificially prettier men, that is, photoshopped pics of men with a 'feminised' jawline, symmetrical features, and the clear skin that forms the contemporary saleable content of everything from airbrushing to spot cream ads. The asymmetrical, the bearded, the dark-skinned, the slightly odd of face...the criminal/terrorist/simiancontinuum...is to abhorred (pushed just a little bit) for the good of the species which is not a species, the European: 'I myself gaze with dread upon that Larousse dictionary of 1932, passed onto me by my parents, wherein, under the heading - viewed as universally unproblematic - of the hierarchy of the races, the skull of the black man is positioned between that of the gorilla, on the one hand, and the European on the other' (Alain Badiou, The Century). With regards to the question of dangerous classification, the discovery of 'monkey syntax' might unhinge that other great arrogance that language is the sole preserve of the 'civilised'...and indeed, if the two words that indicate 'monkey meaning' might usefully be compared to something like binary code (zeros and ones/'pyows' and 'hacks') then we have even less to be proud of...



[asymmetrical and hairy...run away!]

The monkey-ness of man, then, far from pointing to an ideal of the complete linguistically nonsensical ('he was all grunts!') sexual fulfillment of the heterosexual female, symbolises something like a consequence-less sexual encounter (precisely, nothing must be conceived); it - ahem - cannot be thought (the impossibility of the King Kong/blonde actress relationship, for example - size difference necessarily makes actual sexual union impossible; his rage must threaten the literal edifice of hairless human achievement, death to architecture!). The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape...

But these dark desires do not describe the neutured monkeys of contemporary 'cute capitalism' by a long way.

2: The "cute" monkey

From PG Tips to Paul Frank, Barry Ween to Sock Monkey, sexless cartoon simians and fancy-dress apes play a central role in the circulation of goods and images. If freak-shows are exploitative, then we'll replace Monkey Woman, Lobster Boy and Alligator Man with some chimps in dresses sipping tea and banging away at the old Joanna:



Not to mention sell expensive pyjama sets, clocks, pencil cases and other assorted tat with a 'classy' chimp design. After all, no one can copyright a monkey!



Similarly, someone once cynically remarked that if you want to sell a comic, put a monkey in it: for extreme and extensive evidence of this see monkeys and comics.




But cartoon/comic monkeys weren't always used merely to sell tea-bags and bougy trash. Rococo porcelain monkeys routinely mocked the pretensions of the bourgeoisie, as did a certain youthful Karl Marx, who also clearly recognised something crucial in the woman-monkey affiliation:

A young girl swooned at what she saw,
Flew on a monkey's breast and claws.
She batted her eyes, said timidly:
'O depths of exquisite agony!
O harmony! Delicious sorrow!
That monkey thrills me to the marrow!
I feel as if I were magnetised,
The ape played me; I loved him, hypnotised.
O monkey, speak, for I'm bewitched by you!
I just can't breathe, my head is spinning, too!" - Karl Marx, from The Viennese Ape Theatre in Berlin, Early Works.



3. Primatology: a woman's work is never done

Whilst we might want to do damage to the woman-ape couple as the ultimate hairy bearer of heterosexual female desire, there is nevertheless a strange affinity between women and primates at the research level: 62% of members of the world directory of primatologists are female, 90% of sanctuaries around the world are run by women, which could easily make it the most female-dominated of all sciences (or perhaps the only one that is). This is manifestly not because women are 'more nurturing', sensitive or kind (what could be less 'lady-like' than getting involved with a bunch of belligerent and antagonistic chimpanzees violently intent on attacking other animals and each other?). Sometimes, though, specifically female biology, for better or worse (usually worse), serves an, ahem, 'useful' purpose:


suckling monkey

Goodall early on in her studies observed 'two female chimps embark on a murderous, and cannibalistic, campaign against other females' young'. She was hardly put off her work, however, and remains one of the world's most famous living scientists.



Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas and Jane Goodall.

4. The domesticated monkey: women and apes revisited

Besides the historical racist/speciesist implications (actually all too contemporary if football match abuse is anything to go by), there's much to be said for the pre-cute-capitalist colonialist cultural domestication of monkeys...and, conversely, the role they played in the depiction of uppity women who asked for too much ('you'll make monkeys of us all!').

Mistress Margaret Brent, the earliest American woman to demand the right of suffrage. Booze and furry friends! the very edifice of society must surely crumble at the combined sound of drunken female laughter and monkey howls!.

Woman with a Monkey, Georges Seurat, 1884.

Frida Kahlo, Self-portrait with Monkeys, 1943.

#
Woman and Monkey, Pablo Picasso, 1954.

The more possessions a woman has, the smaller the monkey! - two little monkeys...immense amounts of stuff!





[some stuff on robots, I left them out... at some point! possibly].

Me: 'are they talking about elves?'
Mark: 'No. They're talking about themselves.' Hmmm.

By the way, if anyone has seen my glasses, please tell me. I've lost them somewhere - and I'm cross. I've also lost my walkman (yes I know, but I like tapes, especially my Pet Shop Boys albums from Deptford Market - 50p!). If I gave you either of these things in a misplaced fit of tipsy generosity, well, I didn't mean it, give them back...

Dominic Fox writes in re the perennially engaging and not at all silly monkey/robot debate:

'Additional choices: shaved, coiffured and manicured monkey, or a robot covered in artificial hair (+ some artificial robot version of a representative range of female mammalian exudations). You *might* swing the male vote a bit by offering them a three-way with a pair of female bonobos.'

[But I suspect that given the choice, the bonobos would rather pet each other, so to speak. I've seen them do this in real life - it's extremely sweet].

'I get the feeling Sylvia Plath might have gone for a cyberman. Do males who choose males still choose male robots? Do no females lust after the robot Maria from Metropolis?'

The debate widens!

bat correctly points out that I neglected to mention the other interesting monkey story, and also his surprise that nobody chose a 'robot monkey' as their enforced sexual partner. The other interesting story is, of course, the discovery that Putty-nosed monkeys use their two warning calls ('look out, leopard!' and 'look out, eagle!') as 'building blocks' to create a third call with a different meaning. Apprently they use two basic sounds ('pyow' and 'hack'). Up to three pyows followed by up to four hacks seems to mean 'let's move on'. This it looks like syntax the argument goes - and we thought only humans had it. Ack! Our self-appointed majesty is crumbling by the second!

PYOW PYOW PYOW HACK HACK HACK HACK!

I have to go - believe it or not I actually get to have a minor role in a satirical film this afternoon - more on this later!

In the meantime, you should go and read the extremely clever and intricate pieces on architecture, modernism and politics over at Owen's site: Another effort, Britons, if you would be Modernists: One- The Architecture of Smugness and Two- Carrying out the General Line. This has nothing to do with monkeys.

Obviously, one shouldn't trust broadsheets to tell you anything about science, humanity or animality but this is even weirder:

'The scientists hypothesise that interbreeding between our ancestral humans and early chimps created a third, infertile "hybrid" species, the human equivalent of a mule, the infertile offspring of a horse and donkey. Though incapable of breeding among its own, the hybrid is believed to have survived by mating with its parent human or chimp species, before the two separated to follow the two distinct evolutionary paths that led to modern humans and chimps.'

A third, sterile chimpenman/humanzee (ok, Chuman/Manpanzee), breeding back into both species?! Dawkins reckons that 'The discovery of a single chimpanzee/human survivor would demolish our system of ethics'. As if 'ethics' means anything to anyone. But still, come on then! Let the useless wandering offspring of ancient primates destroy the last little bit!

with only firelight and primitive wheels to amuse yourself, you just would, wouldn't you?

Obviously the news that our two sets of ancestors may have interbred many thousands of years after first parting company fills me with a kind of genomic glee...

Commenting on the research, Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, told the Associated Press: "It's a totally cool and extremely clever analysis.

"My problem is imagining what it would be like to have a bipedal hominid and a chimpanzee viewing each other as appropriate mates, not to put it too crudely."

I know the answer! ages ago, I asked a select few people of both m and f persuasion to say whether (if forced!) they would sleep with monkeys or robots. Men said robots whilst women almost universally said 'monkeys'. I think it's safe to say that we know which hominids did the wild thing with the funny-lookin' furry fella....

class!

Sinéad Rushe & Camille Litalien perform two fantastic shows in London, Reading, Belfast, Birmingham, Cardiff (click for dates, locations). Life in the Folds takes its cue from the prose poetry of Henri Michaux; Night-light is all about fear of the dark...go see! Starts tomorrow in London...

nunhead cemetery, 12th May, 2006.

Savonarola in a rare showing: schmitt and the death of politics.

'Schmitt’s solution, that is, the Nazi solution, is, with the party as subjective element of political action, to equate the sovereign with the Führer, the friend with the race.'

Half an excuse to flag up robin's new series of stunning photos (with French commentary!) here: la méthode. And half an excuse to steal a photo of the splendid Justin Clemens (philosopher, poet, model, all-round charmer) at the recent Being and Event workshop at Goldsmiths. His and Oliver Feltham's double-act a class exercise in how to be self-deprecating and rigorous all at once...come back soon!

Blackheath, SE3, for a recent saunter in revolutionary history (occupied on the day by a fairground and circus - but no arcades, thus lacking the opportunity to spend an entire week's food budget on shiny shuffling machines). Birthplace of suffragete Emily Wilding Davison, born in 1872 (she of the possibly-unintentional-self-chucking-under-horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913), and camp-site of fantastic rebellions - the Peasant's Revolt in 1381 and Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450. From the Heath, London STILL appears ready for the taking. Even with the utterly bizarre visual imposition of the hazy gleam of Canary Wharf on the horizon, like something out of a badly-dubbed Japanese kids' cartoon...

To Halcyon Books in Greenwich, who seem perpetually determined to smother their politics section with a large pile of unpriced tat, where an extremely large and important selection of really-quite-famous Marxist historian Gareth Steadman Jones's library seems to have been left (shouldn't these things be left to public libraries, one wonders) - If you're after any key left phil/pol text from the last thirty years, I'd get down there quickly...though I must admit I bought all the books on Feuerbach already, sorry.

Mladen Dolar from his recent and quite splendid A Voice and Nothing More on vivas:

'...we can see that within Anglo-American academia there is an institution actually called viva voce, or just viva: the defense of a dissertation, of a doctoral thesis, which has to be made "in the living voice." In most universities all examinations and tests are nowadays done by writing, so in theory one could actually survive the whole of academic life and get a degree without ever opening one's mouth. Until the viva: at this point, when undergoing the key initiatory ritual, one has to "give voice," one must not just display one's knowledge but perform one's knowledge. the corpus of a candidate's knowledge has been written down in the dissertation, which - supposedly and optimistically - the members of the committee have all carefully read, but this is not enough, it has to be enacted through the voice and only thus made effective. The general experience of these tedious occasions shows that they are indeed simply a question of vocal display; the supposed testing and questioning of the candidate's knowledge has very little to do with that knowledge itself, and has an entirely ritual and vocal character (supplemented by narcissistic struggles and departmental politics under the banner of promoting pure science).'

Ramin Jahanbegloo, prominent Iranian philosopher, recently arrested. We once fell out over a conference report, which was absolutely my fault. His arrest is a big deal: report.

This odd hypothesis comes up a lot. One of the fundamental fantasies of the philosopher: to be imprisoned by the state for some form of subversive activity. And then to spend your time inside doing what you really wanted to do all along, more than shout, more than argue, more than seduce...read...We are all Gramsci now...

What better place to deal with all those books you leave idle whilst you compromise (with a sigh) with the world and its infinite distractions? An anecdotal aside from Negri that reveals a little of the carceral autism that informs the philosopher/prison desire: Prison was brilliant. Someone else cooks for you, you're awake for hours, you read what you have with you, you write on whatever kind of paper you can get your hands on. You give it to the people who visit who will take care of it. The worst bit? Your visitors. Those who turn up once a week and cry on your behalf: it must be terrible in here. How do you cope? No, the awfulness is not prison in the West for those white folk who attack the state - it's the Western distraction from what prison implies: a secular monastery/nunnery, a hermitage, a room of one's own - the fantasy of the philosopher that if only they were left alone then everything they would want to say could be said: without the world.

'Why do people think that communism means Stalinism but capitalism doesn't mean slavery?' - respondent, phone conversation, 2nd May, 2006.

El Lissitzky. (Russian, 1890-1941). Neuer (New Man) from Figurines: The Three-Dimensional Design of the Electro-Mechanical Show "Victory over the Sun", 1920.

"Do you mean," asked Syme, "that there is really as much connection between crime and the modern intellect as all that?"

"You are not sufficiently democratic," answered the policeman, "but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's." - G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, 1907.