Steve Finbow Interview

If the individual is not a coherent set of ideas, actions, and attitudes, can the same be said of their art—and if the ontological relationship between the writer and their work vanishes, then what is an artist? Although my educational background falls into philosophy of the analytic tradition—where names like Kripke and Church were uttered more often than Derrida and Lacan—Ligeia has been the host of many authors influenced by questions the post-structuralists asked in the 20th century. One such experimental writer is Steve Finbow, whose newest book, The Mindshaft, covers a few years in NYC during the 70s. At the book’s center is an underground S/M club—the Mineshaft, with its leather and shackles and slings. Inside, its visitors live at the limits of experience.

In this interview, Steve discusses critical theory, the movie Cruising, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Wharol, the occult, Son of Sam, and more.

Get The Mindshaft from Amphetamine Sulphate’s website.

The introduction on methodology—already performing its argument by taking from many sources—advances ideas influenced by Barthes and others, namely that language maintains its autonomy from the one who wields it as an author, that language performs through text, and that the idea of the author as the origin of the text is implausible. So the author dies, and it is the reader who grants the text unity. How did you come to believe this philosophy and want to put its implications into prominent use throughout this project?

It does stem from Roland Barthes and also from Michel Foucault’s lecture What is an Author? In the process of construction, I hoped to distort the answer Foucault gave, “The Author is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses.” The praxis also has roots in anti-art and antiphilosophy—so a kind of antiliterature—in which, the antiphilosopher (‘author’)—as Boris Groys explains, “is like a contemporary art curator: he contextualizes objects and texts instead of producing them. Production of philosophy (literature) can be interpreted as an extraordinary, mysterious, ‘poetic’ process that is accessible only to a chosen few. Antiphilosophy (antiliterature or literature) does not abolish philosophical (literary) metanoia, but rather democratizes it. Evidence becomes an effect not of production but of post-production. It irradiates no longer through the work, but emerges as an effect of different contextualizations of this work.” From my biography of Allen Ginsberg through to The Mindshaft, I have shifted my writerly emphasis from what I consider a false ‘imaginative creation’ to an experimental form of ‘authentic’ textual anti-temporal curated appropriation. Glad you spotted the meta-methodology.

Curating the art includes both its selection and its arrangement. The book is divided into snippets surrounded by white space throughout. How did the process of placing the text work for you? Was there an intention (if it’s even possible) to provoke apophenia? At times in the reading, I was reminded of the experience of listening to Schoenberg—as if played in an S/M club, of course.

I obsessively take notes while reading and once I had researched the source texts, films, art and music, I had enough material for a book three times the length of The Mindshaft. I excised large sections—one on music, another personal—which I will use in other works. I had an overall idea of the book’s structure and—besides my interest in the transgressive temporary autonomous zones of the S/M clubs of the period—I wanted the book to be a snapshot of New York City from when The Mineshaft opened—October 1976—until just before the outbreak of HIV/AIDS, a three-to-four-year period. So, I began with praxis—the entire set of notes. I then moved on to schematics—dividing the manuscript into colour-coded themes—red for clubs, yellow for S/M, green for Cruising, blue for piers, brown for the Son of Sam, and so on. Then logistics—cutting up the texts and separating them into paragraphs. Then teleology—moving and rearranging the coloured texts into position/juxtaposition with other texts, creating a goal, a narrative of purpose but also one of rhythm and key ideas. Finally, the integer—the sum of the thematic fractions as a new composition.

I also wanted the book to have the atmosphere of the S/M clubs, where anonymous people sexually (textually) interact with other anonymous people, in the dark, music blaring, one text grinding against another, one text caressing another, one text fisting another, one text followed by another and another, a gangbang of texts, an orgy of bodies, of sources, of different voices, different genres. Schoenberg—thanks. Yes, a lot of people would read the book as a dissonant mess. In a kind review, James Champagne described it as “shambolic” and I can understand that but, like Schoenberg’s compositions—which can sound like pure noise to some people—The Mindshaft was constructed using a strict method, which includes transformations, derivations, combinatoriality, aggregates, partitioning and cross-sections from the differing tones of art, S/M, 1970s New York City, films, Foucault, David Berkowitz, the Process Church, and so forth. To paraphrase Schoenberg, a “method of composing with twelve tones (themes) which are related only with one another.” This, in turn, creates apophenia through the repetition of keywords, tones, themes—a strobe effect—as Gilles Deleuze wrote about Hélène Cixous, “writing in strobe, where the story comes alive, different themes connect up, and words form various figures according to the precipitous speeds of reading and association.” I think we’re all apophenic when we read, looking for connections, for clues the author may or may not have placed in the book. Critical theory is apophenia.

One of the notions discussed in the book comes from a concept of Bataille’s—that of a limit-experience. Encounters detailed in The Mindshaft have such intensity that they obliterate divisions between pleasure and pain, master and slave. How has the process of working on the book changed (or not changed) your own take on limit-experiences? Do you think people have more or less of these experiences, more or less “sexual freedom,” now as compared to the 70s?

This question probably requires a book-length answer. Since my early exposure to art—Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Gilbert and George, literature—Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, and William S. Burroughs, and music—Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire and Einstürzende Neubauten, I have been interested in limit-experience. I have written about it in Grave Desire—necrophilia, Notes from the Sick Room—chronic illness and, more recently, in Death Mort Tod in which nearly every chapter is a literary exercise in limit-experience. If we are talking about style, there is also a limit-experience in writers such as Antonin Artaud, Pierre Guyotat, and the earlier critical essays of Nick Land; in their writings, the experience of language is pushed to the limits of meaning. In the S/M clubs, on the piers, in the back of the trucks, gay men experimented with sexual limits—fisting, water sports, and bondage, among other practices—but I’m not sure these were any different or more extreme than what went on in private, or are as radical as many cases in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). That’s why I draw comparisons between the acts in the clubs and the art of Viennese Actionism—the events were ‘shocking’ because they were enacted in the realm of the spectacle.

Sexual freedom is a loaded subject. Sexual freedom for whom? For what? If taboos still exist, which they do, sexual freedom is impossible. We have an increased access to sexual activity through the internet and commodified porn but it is sex—no matter how Balkanized the categories—that remains set within limits. Sexual freedom for paedophiles? For zoophiles? For necrophiles? Total sexual freedom without taboos would be the end of limit-experience and I don’t think Foucault or Georges Bataille would have been interested in that. Charles Fourier was all for sexual freedom. Judith Butler writes about the “impossibility of sexual freedom for black women.” Claude Lévi-Strauss ponders, “Should we dismiss the fact that some tribes permit premarital sexual freedom while others require chastity, on the premise that these customs can be reduced to one function, that of insuring permanent marriage?” Michel Serres believes that, “By creating a communal pool of pathogens, individual sexual freedom has turned into collective viral necessity. This or that local act sets off a global condition of survival.” Wilhelm Reich sees it in Marxist terms, “More than anything else it is the fear of sexual freedom, conceived of as sexual chaos and sexual dissipation in the mind of the reactionary thinker, which has a retarding effect upon the yearning to be free of the yoke of economic exploitation.” And he goes further, “The patriarchal authoritarian sexual order that resulted from the revolutionary processes of latter-day matriarchy (economic independence of the chief’s family from the maternal gens, a growing exchange of goods between the tribes, development of the means of production, etc.) becomes the primary basis of authoritarian ideology by depriving the women, children, and adolescents of their sexual freedom, making a commodity of sex and placing sexual interests in the service of economic subjugation. From now on, sexuality is indeed distorted; it becomes diabolical and demonic and has to be curbed.” And in stating that, he comes surprisingly close to the confessions of Aleister Crowley, “The true offences against marriage arise when sexual freedom results in causing injury to the health or estate of the partner. But the sentimental wrong of so-called infidelity is a symptom of the childishness of the race. Among artists, the system here advocated has always been more or less in full swing. Such societies exist in circumstances highly inimical to a satisfactory life. Financial considerations alone make this obvious; yet it is notorious that such people are almost uniformly happy. There is no revolt against the facts of life, because there is no constraint. The individual is respected as such and is allowed to act as he or she likes without penalty or even reproach.” So, as with morality, sexual freedom is relative. Sexual freedom for the serial rapist?

With the possible arrival of strong AI and sexbots, some twisted variation of the latter may not be absurd. But then what is ‘taboo’ will change, as you reference in the book from Foucault (“transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses”). To move back to the question of a specific time, the film Cruising is described throughout The Mindshaft. Visually, the movie may be one of the best ways for outsiders to get a sense of what places like the Mineshaft and the Anvil were like in those days. What’s your personal reaction to this movie now? And what do you think of the film’s ambiguous ending, where Pacino/Burns examines his reflection as his girlfriend tries on his leather from his Other life, which he has kept?

Serial rapist AI and sexbots—M’s Pop Life, a porn hypermarket in Akihabara, Tokyo, will probably get the first of these. And, yes, taboos are mutable—I wonder what the last will be. I watched Cruising at the speed of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, so it was quite intense and the details quite amazing. I can understand why there were protests against the film; the gay community didn’t want to be portrayed as psychopathic sadists who used S/M sex to lure victims in order to sate their lust-murder desires. But then, all communities have psychopaths in their midst. Al Pacino brings his own intensity to the role of Steve Burns; I think it would have been a whole different movie if Richard Gere had played the role, which he wanted to. Also, William Friedkin—coming after The French Connection and The Exorcist—was a better choice of director than Steven Spielberg (as was mooted) after Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1941. The interiors were to be filmed in the original Mineshaft, but Friedkin ended up building a replica of the bar in a nearby empty building. Take it out of the S/M setting and it’s a passable standard slasher/serial killer movie, but the S/M locations and characters shift the emphasis—in the sexualised drug-and-adrenaline-fuelled atmosphere of the leather bars, Cruising becomes a cinematic snapshot of that world and the immanent/imminent violence of New York City at that specific period of time. I’ve just re-watched the last scene with Pacino/Burns staring in the mirror. We have the female gaze of his girlfriend wearing the “clone” glasses. Then the return male gaze in the mirror as he watches her. And then the gaze changes and becomes narcissistic—he even has a tear in his eye—a proto-queer gaze allowing him (and his girlfriend) the possibilities of non-binary relationships. Dino Franco Felluga, writing about the Lacanian theory of the gaze, argued that, “At the heart of desire is misrecognition of fullness where there is really nothing but a screen for our own narcissistic projections. It is that lack at the heart of desire that ensures we continue to desire.” Pacino/Burns sees (regards) his own ideal homosexual ego.

Love that take, and cannot imagine Spielberg’s version. I only knew of 24 Hour Psycho through DeLillo’s Point Omega, but slowed down versions of films should be available at all pharmacies. Besides Foucault, many other famous visitors haunted the Mineshaft. The photographer Robert Mapplethorpe comes to mind. Though his oeuvre includes S/M collections like X Portfolio, he eventually gained acceptance with figures such as Warhol. What’s your assessment of his importance at that time and his continued controversy through the years, which includes the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center being indicted for obscenity in 1990 after displaying his work?

Mapplethorpe’s three artistic heroes were Jean Cocteau, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Andy Warhol, all of whom fused their lives with their art, and Mapplethorpe was very successful in portraying his life and the interests in his life as art, transmuting being (gay) into (queer) aesthetics. As for his acceptance by figures such as Warhol, I think Patti Smith is both disingenuous and accurate within one paragraph in Just Kids, where she states, “Robert’s great wish was to break into the world that surrounded Andy Warhol, though he had no desire to be part of his stable or to star in his movies. Robert often said he knew Andy’s game, and felt that if he could talk to him, Andy would recognize him as an equal. Although I believed he merited an audience with Andy, I felt any significant dialogue with him was unlikely, for Andy was like an eel, perfectly able to slither from any meaningful confrontation.” I think Mapplethorpe wanted to be part of the Factory set. Later, Warhol and Mapplethorpe painted each other’s portraits, but I believe Warhol only did so in his continuing need to be in touch with—and have a certain control over—younger New York artists, see his collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Warhol died in February 1987 and the three younger artists would be dead within eighteen months of each other, Basquiat—August 1988, Mapplethorpe—March 1989, and Haring—February 1990. Out of the three, Mapplethorpe was the least political but most provocative. I moved to New York in July 1989 and it’s one of my biggest disappointments that I never got a chance to meet Mapplethorpe.

Coincidentally, one of the strongest advocates for the prosecution for obscenity of the X Portfolio in The Perfect Moment retrospective was Senator Jesse Helms. Helms and the FCC tried to ban the reading of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry on public radio—I worked for Allen during those years—and I think Mapplethorpe would have agreed with Allen when he said of Helms, “He thinks more about homosexuality than I do” and “Just because I like to suck cock doesn’t make me any less American than Jesse Helms.” Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio was a limit-experience for photography at the time. But then there’s this hypocrisy in law between the image and the word. Kathy Acker was publishing “obscene” literature in the late ’70s early ’80s, but her only censorship problems were with plagiarism. In 1996, Westminster City Council in London prohibited the screening of David Cronenberg’s Crash, yet there were no calls for J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel to be banned.

The word is probably always more obscure in a de-literate world. Another infamous figure shows up in The Mindshaft—but in the streets outside the club. Son of Sam’s rampage occurred from 1975 to 1977. In your book, you also include the 1981 murders of Elizabeth Platzman and Ronald Sisman. Allegedly, Sisman was killed to recover a snuff film from his possession—one of a Berkowitz killing—and the Process Church, or some other cult, were actually behind the killings in NYC. What do you make of this whole theory? Others have also claimed a link between the Process Church and Manson.

I included the Son of Sam killings because of the timeframe and the temporal snapshot of New York City that I was attempting. I also wanted a kind of moral balance and a more banal metaphor for what was happening in Cruising and the unsolved murders of gay men during that period, their mutilated and dismembered bodies discovered stuffed into garbage bags and dumped into the Hudson. A more interesting conspiracy theory is that the perpetrator was Paul Bateson, an X-ray technician who had had a minor role in The Exorcist. So using apophenia, we can link all of these—Satanism, the Process Church, the Son of Sam, and Robert Mapplethorpe. But the links are tenuous. I am very interested in serial killers—I don’t watch much television, but I think Mindhunter is very good, and Berkowitz and Bateson are two of the killers featured. Charles Manson also but Manson is portrayed as a kind of superstar, which he wasn’t. I don’t find the Manson murders very interesting. I find Berkowitz’s killings banal and cowardly and Manson’s 1960s accursed-share activities likewise.

To believe in conspiracy theories, to apply apophenia to events, situates us in the postmodern where, according to Jacques Derrida, “there has never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the ‘real’ supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement, etc.” Did Berkowitz fantasize about Satanism and snuff movies ordered by the Process Church after the event to make his own killings more interesting? The Elizabeth Platzman and Ronald Sisman murders on Halloween in 1981 are also tenuously connected both to Berkowitz—who claimed he knew the double murder was going to happen—and to eyewitnesses who say Mapplethorpe was present. There is an interesting post on “six degrees of occult separation” here http://fallingrepublic.blogspot.com/2005/06/six-degrees-of-occult-separation.html. Being a huge Throbbing Gristle and Coil fan, I also know that the Process Church was referenced by and influenced Genesis P. Orridge’s Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, making it as ridiculous as any occult fellowship. Here are some of the tenets of the Process Church which seem to fit my thesis in The Mindshaft, “1 And the Satanist stands outside the bounds of the human game. 2 He stands at one of the two extremes. 3 He is an outcast, because he does not fit the pattern. 4 He is removed from the world of human values, detached from the sickening conflicts of the monstrous mind. 5 At the lower end of the scale, he is the pervert and the orgiist; the sensual wallower and the sadist. He delights in cruelty and violence. He revels in the twisting of all social norms. He finds pleasure in pain, and exaltation in paths of degradation.” And you can see that it is a kind of dark Scientology that would be of interest to teenagers. But I don’t believe in God, so that makes it impossible to believe in Satan. In other Process Church documents, Satan isn’t that different from Jehovah. And I don’t mean the romantic lowercase satan of Baudelaire, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud but what Filippo Tommaso Marinetti called the “silly Satanism” of invocations and reification.

Bateson’s appearance in Mindhunter is sufficiently creepy. Disappointing that a 3rd season seems unlikely. The majority of The Mindshaft covers a particular time in NYC, but the text also has two bookends set on a tram in Vienna in the early 1900s, a major turning point in history and philosophy. There, famous figures of the era—Rilke, Freud, Wittgenstein, Hitler, etc.—regard each other like strangers in a club. Why did you decide to include this shift in scope and time? Robert Walser and his Berlin Stories seem to take some prominence here as well.

That is a shame if there’s not going to be a third series. The genesis of The Mindshaft stems from three books—the brilliant 1913: The Year Before the Storm by Florian Illies, which set the groundwork for my thinking of times/places where there have been a confluence of writers/artists/thinkers; David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which gave me the balls to use the material in the way I have; and a chapter from Notes from the Sick Room— “The Morality of Things: Immunology as Interpretation”—in which I write about Bruce Chatwin and Foucault and their experience with HIV/AIDS. I discovered that they visited the same S/M clubs in New York and San Francisco around the same time and there were connections with Mapplethorpe and Gaëtan Dugas—the man who was so-called “Patient Zero”—and I made a note to research this further. Robert Walser is one of my favourite writers, so his works were some of the first I read for usable content. It’s infinitely interesting to me that these people could have travelled on the same tram in Vienna in the opening decades of the 20th century, so I transferred—sublimated—that to New York City in the mid-to-late 1970s. Foucault (Freud) and Chatwin (Kafka) are joined by Mapplethorpe (Trčka), Warhol (Klimt), David Wojnarowicz (Schiele), Edmund White (Zweig), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Pressburger), Julius Eastman (Schoenberg), Alvin Baltrop (Schieberth), Derek Jarman (Korda), Assotto Saint (von Hofmannsthal) and, yes, Gaëtan Dugas (Princip). The Vienna epilogue ends with the resonance of the two shots fired by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The Mindshaft concludes when New York City health authorities closed The Mineshaft and other clubs in 1985 because of the HIV/AIDS epidemic; so these convergences of artists, writers and thinkers are situations that occurred immediately before global cataclysmic events.

Thanks, Steve for the thoughtful responses throughout. You mentioned earlier cutting some writing on music and more personal material from this book for future ones. Any teasers for this? What’s next for you?

And thank you for your thoughtful questions. I never discard material. You never know. At present, I am writing a book about Francis Bacon (the artist) and editing/curating what will be the Infinity Land Press Anthology for publication in the summer of 2021 (https://www.infinitylandpress.com/). Longer term, I am compiling essays on something that will be called Being & Happiness—no italics yet. And I am constantly trying to find the will to type up nearly 1,000 pages of notes on William S. Burroughs. Thank you very much for your time and patience.

Steve Finbow’s nonfiction includes Pond Scum, Allen Ginsberg: Critical Lives, Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia, Notes from the Sick Room, Death Mort Tod: A European Book of the Dead and The Mindshaft. He lives in Langres, France.