LI has to point our readers to a fine, fine example of media contempt, brought to us by our good friends at the NYT, a newspaper that has showcased so many of the great intellects of our time: Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Condi Rice – you name it. Intellects like sounding brass and organ music to the ever sycophantic promoters of the current elite. Yet outside of the magic circle, occasionally some upstart Gunga Din figure creeps in. One who isn’t with the program! One who isn’t on the page! Such, of course, is Mohamed ElBaradei. The wog won a Peace Prize, which marks a man as a deluded leftist, unless the man is a distinguished op ed contributer, like the blessed Henry Kissinger. And here he is again, in fuck up mode, keeping the Bush administration from rolling out their next war! The latest round of negotiations with the Iranians is described in these intro grafs:
“Late in August, Mohamed ElBaradei put the finishing touches on a nuclear accord negotiated in secret with Iran.
The deal would be divisive and risky, one of the biggest gambles of his 10 years as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran would answer questions about its clandestine nuclear past in exchange for a series of concessions. With no advance notice or media strategy, Dr. ElBaradei ordered the plan released in the evening. And then he waited.
The next day, diplomats from the United States, France, Britain and Germany marched into his office atop a Vienna skyscraper to deliver a joint protest. The deal, they said, amounted to irresponsible meddling that threatened to undermine a United Nations Security Council strategy to punish, not reward, Tehran.”
This sets us up for an exciting and comic adventure in El Baradei’s personal life.
Oh, the quotes!
“He has become a compulsive name-dropper, diplomats say. ''He remains a shy man, but one who is somehow dazzled by his own destiny,'' said one European nonproliferation official who knows him well. ''He's always saying, 'Oh, I talked to Condi last week and she told me this,' or 'I was with Putin and he said this or that.' He's almost like a child.''
Or this long description:
“That Nobel night, he was celebrating with friends in his suite at the Grand Hotel in Oslo when thousands of people appeared on the street below, holding candles and cheering. Unsure of himself, he froze.
''He was clearly nonplused and adrift at what to do,'' Mr. Franck recalled. ''His wife told him to wave back.''
A tall, shy man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, Dr. ElBaradei is so averse to small talk that he refuses even superficial conversation with staff members in the agency's elevators, aides say.
Rather than venture into the dining room or cafeteria, he brings lunch from home and eats at his desk. He must be arm-twisted to make even the briefest appearance at important agency functions.
''He is very reserved, very aloof,'' Mrs. ElBaradei said recently over tea in their apartment, filled with rugs from Iran and the awards and other baubles that come with her husband's persona as a campaigner for world peace. ''He thinks these diplomatic receptions and dinners are a waste of time.''
The rugs from Iran and the baubles are such a nice touch! These are obviously colored people, and you know colored people: tasteless gatherers of the gaudiest stuff! Children! Imagine the NYT quoting someone describing say our solemnly elected Commander in Chief as having the emotional and intellectual bearing of a retarded adolescent, going around talking about why the Iraqi's aren't more grateful. Isn’t going to happen.
Of course, here LI has to confess, our media critical side and our urge to use the NYT's genteel racism to wipe our ass came into conflict.
And so it goes, row row rowing the boat of bile and ignorance that is the trademark American style at the moment for column inch after column inch. And occasionally timidly venturing outside the psycho American circle of poisonous groupthink to hit on a few truths (after which, of course, there is the hasty retreat back to fairytale land). For instance, the truth that nobody trusts anything this administration says. The truth that Iran has a perfect right to develop nuclear power if it wants to. The truth that the knowledge of how to develop that power is not going to be expunged from Iran, by hook or crook.
So we end on this bittersweet note, taking up the first three grafs:
“In the days that followed, representatives of other countries hammered Dr. ElBaradei with sharp criticism. But a week later, many governments had begun to believe that their strategy was backfiring. They decided to try to co-opt Dr. ElBaradei rather than isolate him.
The new thinking went like this: he and the Iranians had won this round. Much of the world would consider the agreement on a timetable a step forward. By contrast, Western diplomacy was hopelessly stalled.”
You think? You think that the U.S. being run by shabby and psychotic runts like our horrendous VP, whose quarters, no doubt, contain many a bauble from many an energy company, and our collapsing President, whose TV appearances should be sponsored by Disney and Hustler, since they exude the air of some failed masturbator’s painful exercise in childish fantasy – you think this has something to do with the World?
Monday, September 17, 2007
Sunday, September 16, 2007
polarity and PAM
As one would expect, LI’s researches into the origin of the positive/negative classification of affect [I’m calling this the polarity of affects model – PAM] is forcing us to modify our original hypothesis. Our original hypothesis was modeled, to an extent, on Philip Mirowski’s history of the constituting metaphors of economics. Economists, around 1870, began to adapt a physicalist language to defend a rigorously mathematical equilibrium model of economics. Now, it struck us that the experimental school of psychology was doing the same thing. This would make psychology fit very well as a module within the capitalist field – or its cognate, after 1917, in communism. Accordingly, LI held that PAM diffused outward from the scientific high culture into industry, education, and the sphere of personal relations.
However, further research has made us see that this story, as it stands, can’t be right. While it does focus on the problem correctly – how is it that PAM became, in the twentieth century, the dominant classification system for emotions? – the answer is a bit more complex than some resort, by psychologists, to that familiar form of scientism, the borrowing a vocabulary from physics.
As we see it now, there are three sources of PAM. One, indeed, is that scientism that we have been pursuing, following in Mirowski’s footsteps.
The second is the hedonic calculus. We noted that Kant was already considering whether pleasure and pain could be represented quantitatively in his pre-critical writing. Bentham, who ‘invents’ the hedonic calculus, is drawing on work by other Enlightenment figures. But the calculus is always meant to be a heuristic. It is not meant to represent pleasure and pain in any dynamic sense. Thus, from the point of view of the hedonic calculus, pleasure and pain must appear as units. If they are not units, if they are not, for some reason, separable, then the whole basis of the calculus is overturned. This isn’t really that much of a worry to the first utilitarians, however, since the calculus is a measure suggesting action, rather than an introspective probe.
The third, and perhaps more surprising antecedent of PAM is the re-discovery, in romantic science, of alchemy. Specifically, the re-discovery of force and polarity. Schelling was so impressed by Coloumb’s experiments on magnets in the 1780s – experiments that, for the first time, showed how to measure magnetic force – that he magnified polarity into one of his cosmic principles in his natural philosophy works, such as the Soul of the World. Schelling’s followers, like Oken, tried to find allegorical schemas throughout the natural world. One of his followers, Carus, used polarity to discuss Seelenlehre. And here we begin to see a new tone added to the idea of negative and positive feelings.
I’ll have more to say about this in another post.
However, further research has made us see that this story, as it stands, can’t be right. While it does focus on the problem correctly – how is it that PAM became, in the twentieth century, the dominant classification system for emotions? – the answer is a bit more complex than some resort, by psychologists, to that familiar form of scientism, the borrowing a vocabulary from physics.
As we see it now, there are three sources of PAM. One, indeed, is that scientism that we have been pursuing, following in Mirowski’s footsteps.
The second is the hedonic calculus. We noted that Kant was already considering whether pleasure and pain could be represented quantitatively in his pre-critical writing. Bentham, who ‘invents’ the hedonic calculus, is drawing on work by other Enlightenment figures. But the calculus is always meant to be a heuristic. It is not meant to represent pleasure and pain in any dynamic sense. Thus, from the point of view of the hedonic calculus, pleasure and pain must appear as units. If they are not units, if they are not, for some reason, separable, then the whole basis of the calculus is overturned. This isn’t really that much of a worry to the first utilitarians, however, since the calculus is a measure suggesting action, rather than an introspective probe.
The third, and perhaps more surprising antecedent of PAM is the re-discovery, in romantic science, of alchemy. Specifically, the re-discovery of force and polarity. Schelling was so impressed by Coloumb’s experiments on magnets in the 1780s – experiments that, for the first time, showed how to measure magnetic force – that he magnified polarity into one of his cosmic principles in his natural philosophy works, such as the Soul of the World. Schelling’s followers, like Oken, tried to find allegorical schemas throughout the natural world. One of his followers, Carus, used polarity to discuss Seelenlehre. And here we begin to see a new tone added to the idea of negative and positive feelings.
I’ll have more to say about this in another post.
A warning to UFOB
Convalescing means watching a lot of YouTube, which is how I came across this alarming video of a Democratic Fund Raiser that makes me fear for Mr. Scruggs life.
I hope the crewe at UFOB resisted that invite to the Hilary-Ralph Reconciliation Potluck. Oh, it might look like a fun time, and you all might have been thinking, what the heck. We'll let bygones be bygones. That Hil has a dazzlin' plan for the Middle East, too. And talk about your single payer plan reconciling the legitimate interests of insurance company with the needs of the little guy! Why, I'm seein' stars. I'm seeing security and victory in our war on terrorism and being able to afford getting Betty Sue's appendix yanked! Sure, now, she's had that there appenddycitus for nigh on to two years. She made an awful moaning in the back house, couldn't get to sleep. Lately she does seem to have settled down, though...
But let me tell ya, fellas, it is a trap.
I hope the crewe at UFOB resisted that invite to the Hilary-Ralph Reconciliation Potluck. Oh, it might look like a fun time, and you all might have been thinking, what the heck. We'll let bygones be bygones. That Hil has a dazzlin' plan for the Middle East, too. And talk about your single payer plan reconciling the legitimate interests of insurance company with the needs of the little guy! Why, I'm seein' stars. I'm seeing security and victory in our war on terrorism and being able to afford getting Betty Sue's appendix yanked! Sure, now, she's had that there appenddycitus for nigh on to two years. She made an awful moaning in the back house, couldn't get to sleep. Lately she does seem to have settled down, though...
But let me tell ya, fellas, it is a trap.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
a word on the recent non-event...
When the U.S. congress was considering banning acid, a senate panel took testimony from people like Timothy Leary and Allan Ginsberg. They also interviewed Arthur Kleps. Kleps, of course, was the founder of the Neo-American Boo-Hoo Church. The chief hymn in the church was Row Row Row your boat, and the chief sacrament was LSD. Anyway, in contrast to the load of malarky that we have been treated to on Iraq, and the jabbering of a Democratic leadership that has given new life to the word Dupe and Traitor (insofar as new life can arise from malfunctioning automatons), Kleps gave the Senate something worth hearing. When questioned about the scientific soundness of the claimn that LSD deepened one spiritually, he said:
Listening to the testimony before your subcommittee on Monday, I was, of course, struck by Dr. Goddard's characterization of what we call consciousness expansion as 'bunk,' and I would like to reply to the reasons he gave for making such a judgment when Senator Dodd questioned him further.
"Dr. Goddard said that consciousness expansion did not occur with LSD because the results of objective tests of intelligence and so on given during the session showed negative results; a drop in performance. His argument contains the unspoken assumption that consciousness expansion is necessarily associated with a rise of measured IQ during the psychedelic session. I do not know of any psychedelic person who would agree that that is the case.
"If I were to give you an IQ test and during the administration one of the walls of the room opened up giving you a vision of the blazing glories of the central galactic suns, and at the same time your childhood began to unreel before your inner eye like a three-dimensional color movie, you would not do well on the intelligence test.
"LSD puts you in the mind of God, and God has little interest in our IQ tests. We might say that God has no IQ. God is not a verbal being as we are to such a large extent.
"Now this assumption that consciousness is somehow equated to, or is an aggregate of, those mental faculties which are measurable by objective tests is representative of an entire approach to the subject of psychedelics which is superficially plausible and yet is fundamentally erroneous. It is the only approach which finds favor in the eyes of those administering research grants. It is based on the assumption that if you cannot measure something, it does not exist. In psychology it is rooted in a kind of professional, if not personal, atheism. It produces the horror stories we read about in the field of animal vivisection experimentation resulting from a narrow-minded fixation on trivia, an almost trancelike inability to see the forest for the trees. It results in thousands of people each year earning advanced degrees because they have proved, in effect, that when you put 13 rats in one end of a box, lo and behold, 13 rats come out of the other end of the box in some combination or other.”
Unfortunately for the Boo-Hooists, the golden age in which American high hatters could put 13 rats in one end of a box and get 13 out of the other has long gone. Instead, they squat over the box, deliver a delirious load of their shit, and then assure everybody that, in God’s good time, we will see pure gold, oil, and the winds of liberty come out the other end. The twenty five percent of the self-lobotomized cheer. The newspapers report that the zombies like it, the serious people like it, and by God it tastes good and seems like progress. The oligarchs pat themselves on the back for having spent twenty five years destroying unions and having merged all other organizations into perfect little party pods, where they come out every four years to collect money for the election of a complete suite of ghouls. It is lovely. It is called democracy, or actually cacocracy, rule by the worst.
Row row row your boat…
Listening to the testimony before your subcommittee on Monday, I was, of course, struck by Dr. Goddard's characterization of what we call consciousness expansion as 'bunk,' and I would like to reply to the reasons he gave for making such a judgment when Senator Dodd questioned him further.
"Dr. Goddard said that consciousness expansion did not occur with LSD because the results of objective tests of intelligence and so on given during the session showed negative results; a drop in performance. His argument contains the unspoken assumption that consciousness expansion is necessarily associated with a rise of measured IQ during the psychedelic session. I do not know of any psychedelic person who would agree that that is the case.
"If I were to give you an IQ test and during the administration one of the walls of the room opened up giving you a vision of the blazing glories of the central galactic suns, and at the same time your childhood began to unreel before your inner eye like a three-dimensional color movie, you would not do well on the intelligence test.
"LSD puts you in the mind of God, and God has little interest in our IQ tests. We might say that God has no IQ. God is not a verbal being as we are to such a large extent.
"Now this assumption that consciousness is somehow equated to, or is an aggregate of, those mental faculties which are measurable by objective tests is representative of an entire approach to the subject of psychedelics which is superficially plausible and yet is fundamentally erroneous. It is the only approach which finds favor in the eyes of those administering research grants. It is based on the assumption that if you cannot measure something, it does not exist. In psychology it is rooted in a kind of professional, if not personal, atheism. It produces the horror stories we read about in the field of animal vivisection experimentation resulting from a narrow-minded fixation on trivia, an almost trancelike inability to see the forest for the trees. It results in thousands of people each year earning advanced degrees because they have proved, in effect, that when you put 13 rats in one end of a box, lo and behold, 13 rats come out of the other end of the box in some combination or other.”
Unfortunately for the Boo-Hooists, the golden age in which American high hatters could put 13 rats in one end of a box and get 13 out of the other has long gone. Instead, they squat over the box, deliver a delirious load of their shit, and then assure everybody that, in God’s good time, we will see pure gold, oil, and the winds of liberty come out the other end. The twenty five percent of the self-lobotomized cheer. The newspapers report that the zombies like it, the serious people like it, and by God it tastes good and seems like progress. The oligarchs pat themselves on the back for having spent twenty five years destroying unions and having merged all other organizations into perfect little party pods, where they come out every four years to collect money for the election of a complete suite of ghouls. It is lovely. It is called democracy, or actually cacocracy, rule by the worst.
Row row row your boat…
Friday, September 14, 2007
my disease, my lover
Alas, LI seems to have a non-Darwinian cold. I’ve been kind to my microbes – I’ve taken the aspirins and robuttuson so I could get out and about and spread them, just like a good American. I reduced my diet to soup and bread. I spend ungodly amounts of time hacking my lungs out and slumbering on my bed. Any fair observer would say I was doing my part. But my microbes seem to have some kind of jihadist philosophy. I mean, they seem to want to kill their host!
By killing me, you are killing yourselves, silly microbes, I say. And they reply by giving me another coughing fit.
This is a crying shame, since I went and checked out Mann’s essays and was all prepared to be an ambassador of sweetness and light. Damn. I have some vague plan of applying that notion of imitatio to Goethe himself – for Goethe is a unique case in world literature of a man who quite happily made himself his own monument. There is a biography of Henry Miller entitled, I believe, always happy and bright, and Miller did love to go on about his happiness, but who doesn’t see that this was guff? Not that I mind. But Goethe seemed to have decided, very young, that there was nothing better than being Goethe.
… Which is unfair. The tone of the above. LI is expressing that impression that Goethe gave, and gives. And who among us can be Goethe? I’d even grant that it is the best thing you can be. Much better than being Jesus, or Nietzsche, or even Thomas Mann, god help us. If one of LI’s eternal bitches is that the sage has been driven out of the culture, then we do have to explain Goethe.
Now, I realize my leaping about and cavorting from Lady Ray to Goethe might strike some as highly undignified, or perhaps a sign of my present feverish state. Mann, in his essay about Freud, wrote that Freud showed us how much we owe to disease – how disease is a form of knowing. Mann loved diseases, the slight fever, the restlessness, the brilliant flashes, the highly specialized eros of convalescence.
“L’humanité,” says Victor Hugo, “s’affirme par l’infirmité.” A saying which frankly and proudly admits the delicate constitution of all higher humanity and culture and their connoisseurship in the realm of disease.”
So writes Mann. Above, I wrote that Goethe was his own monument, an unoriginal and sarcastic jibe. A better image comes out of Puysegur. Puysegur was one of the disciples of Mesmer, or perhaps it is better to say that he was an independent researcher in the field of animal magic. In the book, Magic as a Science, Carl du Prel wrote:
“Since Puysegur, the student of Mesmer, it has been known that the somnambulist has the ability to perceive the inner processes of his body, i.e. to take his autodiagnosis. For the sake of briefness I will call this self-seeing (Selbstschau).”
Actually, even Caligari’s somnambulist could not do any such thing. But Goethe seemed to have that magical ability, so perhaps I should say he was his own mesmeric subject, and out of of his autodiagnosis - reading his own entrails - he became a prophet.
By killing me, you are killing yourselves, silly microbes, I say. And they reply by giving me another coughing fit.
This is a crying shame, since I went and checked out Mann’s essays and was all prepared to be an ambassador of sweetness and light. Damn. I have some vague plan of applying that notion of imitatio to Goethe himself – for Goethe is a unique case in world literature of a man who quite happily made himself his own monument. There is a biography of Henry Miller entitled, I believe, always happy and bright, and Miller did love to go on about his happiness, but who doesn’t see that this was guff? Not that I mind. But Goethe seemed to have decided, very young, that there was nothing better than being Goethe.
… Which is unfair. The tone of the above. LI is expressing that impression that Goethe gave, and gives. And who among us can be Goethe? I’d even grant that it is the best thing you can be. Much better than being Jesus, or Nietzsche, or even Thomas Mann, god help us. If one of LI’s eternal bitches is that the sage has been driven out of the culture, then we do have to explain Goethe.
Now, I realize my leaping about and cavorting from Lady Ray to Goethe might strike some as highly undignified, or perhaps a sign of my present feverish state. Mann, in his essay about Freud, wrote that Freud showed us how much we owe to disease – how disease is a form of knowing. Mann loved diseases, the slight fever, the restlessness, the brilliant flashes, the highly specialized eros of convalescence.
“L’humanité,” says Victor Hugo, “s’affirme par l’infirmité.” A saying which frankly and proudly admits the delicate constitution of all higher humanity and culture and their connoisseurship in the realm of disease.”
So writes Mann. Above, I wrote that Goethe was his own monument, an unoriginal and sarcastic jibe. A better image comes out of Puysegur. Puysegur was one of the disciples of Mesmer, or perhaps it is better to say that he was an independent researcher in the field of animal magic. In the book, Magic as a Science, Carl du Prel wrote:
“Since Puysegur, the student of Mesmer, it has been known that the somnambulist has the ability to perceive the inner processes of his body, i.e. to take his autodiagnosis. For the sake of briefness I will call this self-seeing (Selbstschau).”
Actually, even Caligari’s somnambulist could not do any such thing. But Goethe seemed to have that magical ability, so perhaps I should say he was his own mesmeric subject, and out of of his autodiagnosis - reading his own entrails - he became a prophet.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
imitatio Goethe
One of the most puzzling parts of my happiness thesis is that dealing with age. I’ve been fumbling around, looking for ways to express my instinctive feeling that the extinction of certain age defining roles within the economy of the Great Transformation was the result of the rise of the happiness norm. Say, there’s a crafty mouthful for ya! Last year, LI was all about the persistant coupling of the sage and the buffoon and its variants, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza traipsing across the interior landscapes of Western history, figures that figured a dialectic as surely as Peter Piper picked a peck of peppers.
So imagine my joy, yesterday, as I was hunting and pecking about, looking for stuff on Goethe, to find this:
In his 1936 essay, Freud and the Future, Thomas Mann wrote: “… the father play [Vaterspiel] and its transference to father substitutes of a higher and spiritual type – how much this form of infantalism determines, seals and educates [bildend] the individual life. I say develops: for the most genial, joyful specification of that which one names ‘education’ [Bildung] is to me, in all seriousness, this formation and marking through the admired and beloved one, though the childish identification with some one father imaged chosen out of one’s deepest sympathy. The artist, this ludic and passionately childish person, could very well sing a song of the seacret and yet public influences of such infantile imitation in his biography, in his productive life performance, which is so often nothing more than the revival of some hero’s vita under very different conditions of time and personality and with very other – we’d even say childish – means. So the imitatio Goethe starts with memories on Werther, the Meister stage and the olderphase of Faust and the Divan can still, today, lead the experience of a writer unconsciously, and determine him mythically – I mean, from his unconsious, although in the artist the unconscious of every moment tends to play over the happy object of his consciousness and his childishly profound attention.”
I love this. I love the idea of the imitatio Goethe. Imitatio of that kind is exactly how the sage (and the buffoon) ended up as a mad knight and his peasant page, or a social parasite and a philosophe. LI is busy today, but we must return to this soon. With, of course, the appropriate questions, among them: whether the father in this fatherplay doesn’t bring with him that fatal inauthenticity of all substitutes. Or whether, at the end of the imitatio, I have to look at Dad’s face in the mirror. Me, a child of the homunculus, like all the rest of us.
So imagine my joy, yesterday, as I was hunting and pecking about, looking for stuff on Goethe, to find this:
In his 1936 essay, Freud and the Future, Thomas Mann wrote: “… the father play [Vaterspiel] and its transference to father substitutes of a higher and spiritual type – how much this form of infantalism determines, seals and educates [bildend] the individual life. I say develops: for the most genial, joyful specification of that which one names ‘education’ [Bildung] is to me, in all seriousness, this formation and marking through the admired and beloved one, though the childish identification with some one father imaged chosen out of one’s deepest sympathy. The artist, this ludic and passionately childish person, could very well sing a song of the seacret and yet public influences of such infantile imitation in his biography, in his productive life performance, which is so often nothing more than the revival of some hero’s vita under very different conditions of time and personality and with very other – we’d even say childish – means. So the imitatio Goethe starts with memories on Werther, the Meister stage and the olderphase of Faust and the Divan can still, today, lead the experience of a writer unconsciously, and determine him mythically – I mean, from his unconsious, although in the artist the unconscious of every moment tends to play over the happy object of his consciousness and his childishly profound attention.”
I love this. I love the idea of the imitatio Goethe. Imitatio of that kind is exactly how the sage (and the buffoon) ended up as a mad knight and his peasant page, or a social parasite and a philosophe. LI is busy today, but we must return to this soon. With, of course, the appropriate questions, among them: whether the father in this fatherplay doesn’t bring with him that fatal inauthenticity of all substitutes. Or whether, at the end of the imitatio, I have to look at Dad’s face in the mirror. Me, a child of the homunculus, like all the rest of us.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
lady bitch ray
Occasionally some brave soul will speak up in the theorysphere and say that not only should porno be defended, but that it should be made, and made better. For instance, the Love and Terrorism blogger has announced his own porno project. IT’s money shot post still provokes responses, such as this indirect one from Naught Thought - and I believe IT has hinted that she has the utopian hope for better
porn in the future, something that would be erotic and overthrow the old, crusty structures of the Oedipal complex. Angela Carter, in one of her best essays, Sade and the Sadeian woman, announces the same project, which flowed into what is, for me, her finest novel – The Passion of New Eve. But – perhaps due to the language barrier – the academic who has actually crossed the line is hardly known in the English world. I’m talking about Ladybitchray, aka Reyhan Şahin. She is, as ralkorama puts it, “firstly a bitch, secondly a turk, and thirdly an academic.”
Actually, schlampe here really should be ‘slut’. On her website, she has posted a rather bizarre french video of herself in which she claims to be the whore of Germany. There are also three songs on the site. Now, yours truly truly does not like aggro rap. Ladybitchray is the only German rapper we can really stand. Partly this is because her voice does not produce a harsh or hard effect, as though it were trying to close itself off and become that bullet in your ear that goes through and takes out all your brain matter – which is how Bushido sounds to us. At the same time, Deutschland siktir lan is a great example of what makes Reyhan Sahin interesting. Siktir lan is turkish for fuck you. As Ladybitchray, Sahin straddles the polysemy of fuck, the insult and the caress intertwined there, just as she loves to place herself atop other cracks – the Turkish/German one, for instance. There is a notorious anti-Turkish element among some German rappers, so this is a position that holds a real risk. And that she plays with it by playing with the whole patriotic German thing is, well, admirable. But fucking, whether in Turkish or German, is not the word she is famous for. She is famous, in Germany, for her constant use of ‘pussy’ and ‘cunt’. She was dismissed from Radio Bremen when the owners of that station discovered that she used ‘inappropriate language’ on her internet videos. Being a very good self-promoter, Şahin peddled that story, plus some T and A, to Bild, a news magazine that combines the delicate sensibilities of Maxim with the investigative reporting style of the National Enquirer. It has long been the mainstay of the reactionary media empire built by Axel Springer. Sahin correctly bet that T and A would overcome the bias against a guest worker’s daughter.
On the other hand, the bigotry she evokes flows pretty effortlessly in the German press. Here’s a typical review from Citybeat:
“The woman suffers from a penetrating exhibitionist’s need to show herself, and is obsessed about building a career no matter what the price. We are talking about “Lady Ray”, alias Reyhan Sahin, from Bremen-Gröpelingen. This underclass rapper created in the beginning of the year a private broadcast that she advertised in the Bild paper and in Boulevard Magazine, after which, out of easy to infer grounds, her collaboration with Radio Bremen was pulled. The ‘female rapper’, whose demo seems to be the underclass of the underclass, is thus just of the type who drops out of the 8th grade and tries for a career a la Bushido.”
Before she became a pornorapper, she was a student in the sociology of communications. In this Spiegel interview, Şahin proclaims that she is bringing pussy style to Germany, but her fashions are not exactly avantgarde eroticware. The camera follows her to a library table in the Rosa Luxemberg institute at the University of Bremen. And she explains her double personality by grabbing her tits – one representing Ladybitchray, one Reyhan Şahin, I suspect that she is referencing one of the famous cliches of German literature, Goethe’s ‘two persons, alas, live within this breast”.
I suspect this because she has gone from a rapper to a surrealistic talk show host, and her show is cluttered with phrases and innuendos making Germany into a magpie’s nest – here horror, here a puppet, here a strudel. For who else would feature a puppet named Dr. Mengele, a dreadlocked pianist, and a stolid looking German hausfrau cooking, on a set that centers around a bed? On which bed she invites her guests, German rappers, to lie with her. She inevitably introduces them as guys with “big cocks”, and casually talks about her pussy, her tits, and her need to fuck, which – when her guest is a real asshole – can lead to pretty hilarious results
porn in the future, something that would be erotic and overthrow the old, crusty structures of the Oedipal complex. Angela Carter, in one of her best essays, Sade and the Sadeian woman, announces the same project, which flowed into what is, for me, her finest novel – The Passion of New Eve. But – perhaps due to the language barrier – the academic who has actually crossed the line is hardly known in the English world. I’m talking about Ladybitchray, aka Reyhan Şahin. She is, as ralkorama puts it, “firstly a bitch, secondly a turk, and thirdly an academic.”
Actually, schlampe here really should be ‘slut’. On her website, she has posted a rather bizarre french video of herself in which she claims to be the whore of Germany. There are also three songs on the site. Now, yours truly truly does not like aggro rap. Ladybitchray is the only German rapper we can really stand. Partly this is because her voice does not produce a harsh or hard effect, as though it were trying to close itself off and become that bullet in your ear that goes through and takes out all your brain matter – which is how Bushido sounds to us. At the same time, Deutschland siktir lan is a great example of what makes Reyhan Sahin interesting. Siktir lan is turkish for fuck you. As Ladybitchray, Sahin straddles the polysemy of fuck, the insult and the caress intertwined there, just as she loves to place herself atop other cracks – the Turkish/German one, for instance. There is a notorious anti-Turkish element among some German rappers, so this is a position that holds a real risk. And that she plays with it by playing with the whole patriotic German thing is, well, admirable. But fucking, whether in Turkish or German, is not the word she is famous for. She is famous, in Germany, for her constant use of ‘pussy’ and ‘cunt’. She was dismissed from Radio Bremen when the owners of that station discovered that she used ‘inappropriate language’ on her internet videos. Being a very good self-promoter, Şahin peddled that story, plus some T and A, to Bild, a news magazine that combines the delicate sensibilities of Maxim with the investigative reporting style of the National Enquirer. It has long been the mainstay of the reactionary media empire built by Axel Springer. Sahin correctly bet that T and A would overcome the bias against a guest worker’s daughter.
On the other hand, the bigotry she evokes flows pretty effortlessly in the German press. Here’s a typical review from Citybeat:
“The woman suffers from a penetrating exhibitionist’s need to show herself, and is obsessed about building a career no matter what the price. We are talking about “Lady Ray”, alias Reyhan Sahin, from Bremen-Gröpelingen. This underclass rapper created in the beginning of the year a private broadcast that she advertised in the Bild paper and in Boulevard Magazine, after which, out of easy to infer grounds, her collaboration with Radio Bremen was pulled. The ‘female rapper’, whose demo seems to be the underclass of the underclass, is thus just of the type who drops out of the 8th grade and tries for a career a la Bushido.”
Before she became a pornorapper, she was a student in the sociology of communications. In this Spiegel interview, Şahin proclaims that she is bringing pussy style to Germany, but her fashions are not exactly avantgarde eroticware. The camera follows her to a library table in the Rosa Luxemberg institute at the University of Bremen. And she explains her double personality by grabbing her tits – one representing Ladybitchray, one Reyhan Şahin, I suspect that she is referencing one of the famous cliches of German literature, Goethe’s ‘two persons, alas, live within this breast”.
I suspect this because she has gone from a rapper to a surrealistic talk show host, and her show is cluttered with phrases and innuendos making Germany into a magpie’s nest – here horror, here a puppet, here a strudel. For who else would feature a puppet named Dr. Mengele, a dreadlocked pianist, and a stolid looking German hausfrau cooking, on a set that centers around a bed? On which bed she invites her guests, German rappers, to lie with her. She inevitably introduces them as guys with “big cocks”, and casually talks about her pussy, her tits, and her need to fuck, which – when her guest is a real asshole – can lead to pretty hilarious results
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