IN TROPICAL - LIES

From In Tropical and Jonathan Leder, the NY-based photographer of vintagesque Playboy pornomodelling.


Note: I'm turning a blind eye on the preposterous implication that a prostitute would want her clients to love her, and otherwise she might be expected to exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic disorder. Particularly, because I'm such a big sucker for semi-gratituous nudity set to dramatic storytelling and catchy tunes. Besides, I like how vultures duplicate dispassionate sexual necrophagists that fill capitalist deserts of flesh exchange nowadays, and the way they feed on the perishing sensuousness reminds me of the Baudrillardian melancholia for true seduction, too.

THE NEW OLD PORN PROTOCOL

1. Do not imagine that the pornography upon which you are engaged will ever authorize any possible explanation, interpretation, or knowledge of the world; you have riskier, more interesting work to do. Pornographic invention is neither an alternative form of knowledge, nor does it replace knowledge. Rather, it is the irreducible supplement of knowing, pornographic invention engages what the aspiration of explanation, interpretation, and knowledge can only dismiss as accidental, transitional at best. [. . .]

2. Abandon the assumption that the pornographic enterprise is reducible to questions of representation, correspondence, adequation, or judgment; what is specifically pornographic in porn is precisely what in the act of presentation exceeds representation, for porn is not merely a portrait of pleasure, but presents itself as in itself pleasurable; provoke pleasure and enjoyment instead of teaching appreciation, and thereby free art's work from every possibility for a moralistic pedagogy.

3. Address yourself, therefore, to what of your readers exceeds knowing, judging, or desiring subjectivity, for it is neither epistemological, moral, nor desiring subjects who experience the unbearable pleasure of the fuck. Offer them not objects that would confirm them in the comfortable neuroses of their subjectivities, but the singular risk of the fetish, withdrawn from the very possibility of intelligibility and meaning. Honor thereby the ontological stammering upon which the art's work opens, thus recalling to your readers what of life, beyond all reason, is consecrated to pleasure, bios apolaustikos.

4. In addressing yourself to what is most obscene and perverse in your readers - that is addressing yourself to the indestructible supplement of interpretation, knowledge, judgment, or desire, in addressing yourself to the chaos of the passions and affects, in addressing yourself to thinking - you thereby abandon the respectable comforts of the seductive transcendence promised in nostalgia and prolepsis. Choose non-transcendence, the destitution of John Greyson's Patient Zero in Patient Zero, Luke in Gregg Araki's The Living End, the unrepentant faggot of Diamanda Galás's Plague Mass, the cast of Samuel Delany's The Mad Man, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille's "utter fool," all memebers of a "race" that in affirming its non-transcnedence "is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race - the very ones Kafka excluded form the paths of the new Critique," as Deleuze and Guattari have it: the whore, the hustler, the bad queer, the junkie, the Lumpenproletariat, the mad, the stranger.

5. And thereby abandon any project that would reduce the political (as such) to any geography of location or cartography of position, whether literal or metaphorical. Abandon the putatively neutral white cube of the museum for the labyrinth and the corridor; desert the boulevard for the alleys, forsake the park's lawns for the shrubbery; leave the stadium for the deserted warehouse. Or better yet, transform the white cube into a labyrinth, architecture into something not simply anti-architectural, but undecidedly contingent, something at once both and neither architecture and anti-architecture. Above all. transform location or position, always already a point in space fixed in a possible cartography or geography, into place, the "here, now" of Whitehead's prehension, or Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, or the place of the stranger's pleasure - all of which specify an engagement of thinking with its impossibility precisely in an absolute resistance to any attempt to reduce place to location. "Here, "now" is the place of simultaneity of deterritorialization/reterritorialization, the place of fragmentation, anonimity, promiscuity, utter strangeness, unknowable difference, and an obscene perverse pleasure subject to no possible calculus. The New Porn never forgets that this untenable place of absolute risk is at once infinitely hospitable and entirely uninhabitable; "here, now" is nevertheless the New Porn's only place, for it is here, and here alone that the political ("in itself and as such") happens.

William Haver, from the Foreword to The Logic of the Lure and the New Pornography. London: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p.xi-xiii.

HOGG

"You know what I'd do if I was a bitch?" He looked at his finger, but there wasn't enough on it, so he dug out some more. "I'd get me a gun, go out on the street, and - bip! bip! bip! - I'd put a bullet in everything I even suspected had a pecker swingin' between its legs. Anything else a bitch is gonna do is crazy. Course, bitches is crazy. But the way you know it is just 'cause they don't do the one sane thing they could: Go out and start shootin'." Hogg gnawed on his thumbnail. He said around his knuckle:"Men hate bitches, man. All men hate all bitches."

Samuel R.Delany, Hogg. Boulder: Black Ice Books, 1994.

Over 40 years after its conception, I can't believe how profoundly vicious this book still is.

SOMETHING ENDS.

"Serce mrozi nadmiar czułości dla innego człowieka. Nadciąga chwila, której pełne przeżycie nie jest możliwe. Pojawia się zazdrość o coś nieidentyfikowalnego, co wyłania się z przeszłości i czego nie sposób przymusić do powtórnego przyjścia. Radosne wyzwolenie, z jednoczesnym poczuciem nieodwracalności chwili, zmienia popęd w płacz. Wiadomo, że wiele gatunków zwierząt umiera w czasie tarła lub parzenia się. Coś się kończy. Nawet kiedy kocha się najmocniej, coś się kończy."

["The heart freezes the abundance of affection for another person. A moment comes when the complete experience becomes impossible. Jealousy over something unidentified from the past appears and this something cannot be forced to return. The joyful release simultaneous with the feeling of irreversibility of the moment turns joy into cry. It's common knowledge that a lot of animal species die during spawning and copulation. Something ends. Even when you love the most, something ends." - Trans. mine]

Pascal Quignard, Seks i Trwoga. Czytelnik: Warszawa, 2002. Tłum. Krzysztof Rutkowski.

THE STORY OF THE I.

Tomasz Swoboda's Historie Oka is, as far as I'm concerned, up to date the most linguistically and meritoriously succulent synthesis of Bataillean thought, and notably by a Polish philologist and translator. For those unfamiliar with Bataille and his work - his input into French literature includes an expansive stream of meditation on the unspeakable in human sexuality and trasgressive [as in agressive and futile) behavior in general and his books are, for me at least, yet unsurpassed in their minimal though excruciating depiction of surreal eroticism of fetishistic paroxysms. He's also the explicator of material heterology, pineal gland, solar anus and other profanely contextualized concepts of great importance for us, the believers in the corporeal, the impossible and the excessive.
Here's a purely arbitrary and condensed collection of quotes from my favorite propagator of philosophical obscenity.

Hans Bellmer, a drawing for Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'Oeil, 1947.

The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing. - The Story of the Eye, p.23

... at the end of reason, at the end of man, at the end of the Cartesian pineal gland (the supposed seat of consciousness) there is only orgasm and a simultaneous fall, a simultaneous death. - Visions of Excess, p.xii

God, when he knows, is a pig. - Madame Edwarda, p.160

Realism gives me the impression of a mistake. Violence alone escapes the feeling of poverty of those realistic experiences. Only death and desire have the force that oppresses, that takes one's breath away. Only the extremism of desire and of death enables one to attain the truth. - The Impossible, Preface p.9

On a comprehensive view, human life strives towards prodigality to the point of anguish, to the point where the anguish becomes unbearable. The rest is mere moralising chatter. - Erotycyzm, p.65

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. - Erotycyzm, p.141

Only the actual experience of states of normal sexual activity and the clash between them and socially approved conduct allows us to recognise that this activity has its inhuman side. The organs' plethora induces reactions alien to the normal run of human behaviour. A rush of blood upsets the balance on which life is based. A madness suddenly takes possession of a person. That madness is well known to us but we can easily picture the surprise of anyone who did not know about it and who by some device witnessed unseen the passionate lovemaking of some woman who had struck him as particularly distinguished. He would think she was sick, just as mad dogs are sick. Just as if some mad bitch had usurped the personality of the dignified hostess of a little while back. Sickness is not putting it strongly enough, though; for the time being the personality is dead. For the time being its death gives the bitch full scope, and she takes advantage of the silence, of the absence of the dead woman. The bitch wallows-wallows noisily-in that silence and that absence. The return of the personality would freeze her and put an end to the sensual delight she has abandoned herself to. - Erotycyzm, p.106

What is really loved is loved mainly in shame. - L'esprit moderne et le jeu des transpositions

Why is the world of sin boring? Because it likes its sin without
wanting to know it. You always talk to us about the explosion of the
world of sin. This world is truly tarnished. - P.Klossowski on Bataille. Discussion On Sin - The Unfinished System of Knowledge,p.43

What is the worst aberration?
That which we ignore, gravely holding out for wisdom?
That from which, when we see it, we know there is no escape? - The Unfinished System of Knowledge,p.84

I risk myself if sensuality or pain project me beyond a sphere where I have only one meaning: the sum of the responses I give to the demands of usefulness; I am at risk when, at the end of the possible, I tend so strongly toward that which will overturn what the idea of death pleases in me-and I laugh, taking pleasure in it. - The Unfinished System of Knowledge,p.98

And so what: I'm free, powerless, and I will perish: I ignore the limits of obligation in every way. - The Unfinished System of Knowledge.p.108

SASHA GREY II

SASHA GREY from V Magazine on Vimeo.

"Shot on location at the John Lautner Chemosphere House off Mulholland Drive, the film showcases Sasha as a perpetually evolving figure. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick (“Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Wall Street,” “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”) dressed Sasha for the part in an array of lingerie and military inspired garments to highlight the dual nature of her masculine / feminine persona. Looking over the roadside from the vantage point of one the most legendary residences in modern and cinematic history, Sasha reflects on her relationship to the San Fernando Valley landscape- the location of some of her most noted adult performances. Back inside the circular vortex of the Chemosphere, Sasha's inner dialogue projects an equally diaristic and imaginary self-portrait that pushes beyond the extremes of her past filmography and into her new future." [emphasis mine]

Remember kids, she's not a whore if she's an actress.
I'm actually not even being cynical here. This verbal specification of her "portrait" blew my mind as something between a grandiloquent psychic reconaissance (Lynchian?? one at that!)into her porn-star-turned-model-turned-crypic-icon-of-postmodern-feminity persona and, on the other hand, a thin promotion of supposedly bland acting career in her independent film pieces. But again, I'm a fan so I'm not going to be objective here and, quite honestly - there's nothing NOT to like in this video - the minimal plot which nonetheless might leave you wondering as to the level of private self-exposure, the musical background with the haunting drummings of Chelsea Wolfe's "Moses" (which in my opinion are to express Grey's emotional struggle between her public violently pornographic exhibitionist facade and deeply reflexive and calm (perhaps even religious in a mystical sense) subliminal self, the landscape and lighting which bespeak loneliness, the future exertions or perhaps an isolated act of redemption in the limbo of Chemosphere simultaneously negated by the half-attired body and the black make-up of an unrepenting sinner, the as always sphinxlike visage which all the same could be just an empty mirror of our materialistic desires..

"TIE ME UP"

There is an original music video to this song directed by Mike Figgis, heavily styled up for Agent Provocateur's lingerie commercial (although it's hard to tell with those stiletto shots and supine bordello atmosphere, or maybe it's easier, dunno). Anyway, the song has stuck in my head for some time now and I officially need to rehash the old BDSM flame so all the same why not with these mainstreamized vapors of bondage sexuality.

SEXUATION DEGREE ZERO

Some purely subjective musings on the dumbed down representations of mental and physiological development of children and adults that we are bombarded with in the media.


To extend Judith Butler's performativity of gender to the contemporary times, one'd have say that sexuality can be understood solely in the context of performance. Notice three modes of media-propagated sexulizations, or, to be more radical - sexuations - in the Lacanian meaning of the word as steering sexuality according to the emptying jouissance and not biology. Women are basically oversexualized as children[1-see below] and sexually CRYogenized as adults[2-see below]. Men are androgynized as children and infantilized as adults[3-see below]. Perhaps in the case of women, this is no news - women at all stages of development were treated as sexual objects (the only novelty is that grown women have gone from being artificially perfectified to simply being grotesque non-aging zombies or prematurely uglified role models - see Lady Gaga). However, I truly am devastated at how the notion of masculinity has retrograded to either patriarchal cavemen or sissy gynandromorphous abominations, not to mention that the institution of fatherhood has been debauched to the extent that neither Freud nor Nietzsche could have predicted (incest is the new word). Not that I'd vote for the propagation of 'normative' sexuality, whatever that means, but the all-out apocalypse of ANY norms and aesthetic categories has reached a level where heterosexual women might start to reconsider feminist agenda and post-civil rights movement freedoms (Yes, I sometimes miss barter sexual economics). The unforeseen peak of sexual revolutions is this - instead of gender egalitarianism, we live in an emasculated/pedophilic reality of age-based political incorrectness, and the one that is conspicuously exhibited in the sexual Grand Guignol on our screens.

[1]the popularity of teen hoes in general but especially teen hoes and their Negro pimps from Ark Music Factory - (or if you are too auricularly irritable to listen to Rebecca Black (though I'm pretty sure you already have), just see this prepubescent performance (or, since youtube finally removed this due to, I guess, paedophilically stimulating content, just enter "little girl sexy dance" on the same video hosting service - it's full of shitheaded, half-attired dancing brats)

[2]Lady Gaga and her unceasing spectacle of physical and spiritual teratology (audio-visually packed albeit symbolically empty) vs absurdly non-aging J-Lo and Katy Perry's teenage dreams, not to forget the reversely tik-toking biological and mental clock of Ke$ha in music videos where preposterously hulky male models prance on beaches/bitches or high school corridors to sensational lyricism and gaudy performance providing generated carnal fantasies for heterosexual women who neither have sex with hulky male models nor live near a beach/bitch or go to high school.

Guess which ones were "born this way".


[3] Justin Bieber, brainless gym junkies with hairless sculpted chests under half-uplifted shirts, and presumably small penises (those who have big penises get into porn business but mostly fuck other men, dispassionately, so that's somehow still within the framework of sexual apocalypse). Old slobs and underage prostitutes, the logical end to capitalist patriarchism. Filiarchy.

Now, don't get me wrong. In porn, and real-life situations which do not involve money, slavery and/or non-consenting sex I'd go for age disproportion anytime. Plus, I am in favor of all forms of pornographic expression for and with widely-understood "mature" audience, including gay porn, incest, midgets and barely legal teens (YET, as a recent excursionist in Deep Web, I'd be ..reluctant, to say the least, to include CP in this list). Where life is restrained by behavioral formulas, art is where the fantasies of transgression and defilement of beauty (if needed and always needed as Bataille claimed) can be realized. And, more universally, to paraphrase my previous post from Żuławski's bed-pot of wisdom: isn't the possiblity of innocence in life, as in mimetism, always already lost? Still, must everything be sleazily coated in money and boredom? As if everyone has lost the ability to marvel at the intimacy and pain of transgression, no matter how hard they stupefyingly salivate over their own mechanical physical reactions.

Hank Moody, waiting for somebody to pass him his Axe clicker.

Coming back to men. Compare the patterns of manhood from the pre-00s (back when being hulky and American had symbolic significance on political level) and patters of manhood today (how naive I was thinking back in the days that metrosexuality was just going to be a passing trend, a blind alley of sexual evolution). Yet, not all imagery of manliness falls into this trend. Take the handsome Hank Moody from the popular HBO show Californication. Moody is an aging boozer, a one-hit wonder literary celebrity and the epitome of modern family man whose repeated problems with the law and countless sexual relations with females of various ages are ascribed to the irresolvable inner conflict between the emotional retardation and cool inborn sexual prowess. Hank's best friend, for contrast, is a gutless overweight agent who, despite physical repulsiveness, also gets his share of pussy count (literally, that's a goal in the recent episodes). I've been watching the 1st season like a late-night soft-core porno with better dialogues and stronger character interaction. Recently though, the creators aim for an incongruous redemptive dramatic development as Hank, more and more estranged from the moral harbor of his homespace, is left at every second episode's emotional cliffhanger with depressingly long face of an alleged rapist, pussy wrecker and literary failure who brought shame on his daughter and impeccable wife Karen in whom he is still mutually infatuated. There goes my problem with mainstream mendacity of male movie characters. While Moody is neither saint nor demasculinized, he is bogus, like Axe commercials that'd attempt to sell melodramatically any remaining positive values of manhood. No wonder Hank presents a nearly unsolvable puzzle of godlike moral reserve combined with earthly sexual dirtiness to Polish men (http://www.film.org.pl/prace/californication.html) Despite a heavy dose of auto-ironic comic relief (like, when Hank takes a dump on his ex-wife's fiance's car - that hilarious retarded bastard "lol" - or having a penis hemorrhage while shaving your balls)this is a male fantasy of dubious marital monogamy enriched by threesomes, schoolgirl sex, revenge fucking, drunk behavior, cheating, casual sex, rock'n'roll, glamorous Cah-li-forh-niah girls waiting to suck your cock on every shop corner etc. Instead, I'd love to see a spin-off with Eddie Nero portraying Charlie Sheen, and where they let Moody's ex-wife have wild interracial sex and get her hair finally fucking rumpled for once.

NOCNIK

"[S]eks od dzieciństwa po przedwczesną śmierć na stosie usypanym z pizd i peruk, i bezwzględnego wykorzystywania dziecka w sobie, które się deprawuje nieodwracalnie. To już wpisało się w zmarszczuszkach, zmarszczkach, grymasach... Kolektywna nieświadomość kina, kino jest wiedną niewiedzą... Do kina zamiast do burdelu... Perwersjonowanie siebie jest szablonem wciąż tym samym. Nauczyć się go? Nigdy. Obserwować? Zawsze."

["sex, since childhood until the premature death on a pile made of cunts and wigs and the downright exploitation of the child in oneself, irreversibly depraved. It has been inscribed into the crinkles, wrinkles, grimaces... The collective unconsciousness of the cinema, the cinema as knowing unknowledge... To the cinema instead of a whorehouse... Perversifying of oneself is the unchanging cliche. To learn it? Never. To observe? Always."]

Andrzej Żuławski Nocnik, 88

DELIVERANCE

Having finally read the novel, after four decades of oblivion as to the masterful origins of backwoods horror, I nailed the tremendous importance of the staggering number of flicks figuring yellow-toothed, dirty-nailed, obnoxiously fiendish personages from "the Country of Nine-Fingered People and Prepare to Meet Thy God"[1]. The book reads like an eerie crossbreed of the early unpredictably surrealistic rural pornography[2]and horrifically suspenseful first Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) fused with the writing sensibility of Raymond Carver and unrelenting survivalist machismo. The sexual component is not so much prominently present in the novel, as merely hinted in abrupt inhales of menacingly unfamiliar country air or scrotum-cringing (albeit weirdly matter-of-factly erotic) moments of contact with the widely-understood nature. The portentous prediction of Lewis, the only survivalist maniac among the four urbanites in the story, that "the whole thing is going to be reduced to the human body"[3] is promptly fulfilled in the encounter with two inhabitants of Helms County who anally rape one of the friends, but more subtly during numerous organoleptic contiguities, initiated by the mystic interaction with "the gold eye" of the pussy-holding Kitt'n Britches model[4], and succeeded by the abject glimpse of slaughtered chickenhead in the river, the forced, sensuous crawling/"fuck[ing"[5] against/of moon-lit cliff performed by Ed, or the ambiguous meshing with the rapists themselves. Take the narrator's initial repulsion towards Stovall and his playmate, followed by a primal, nearly homoerotic fascination. This is the first description we get of the assailants:

They came forward, moving in a kind of half circle as though they were stepping around something. The shorter one was older, with big white eyes and a half-white stubble that grew in whorls on his cheeks. His face seemed to spin in many directions. He had on overalls, and his stomach looked like it was falling through them. The other was lean and tall, and peered as though out of a cave or some dim simple place far back in his yellow-tinged eyeballs. When he moved his jaws the lower bone came up too far for him to have teeth.[6]

The one that initiates the sodomic act is also identified as having a "sick-looking face"[7] or simply "whorl-faced"[8], which together with the country drawl makes for overly reprehensible yokelness. But passages later Gentry, the would-be rape victim, exhausted after his erotic cliff union and animalistically prepared for killing hunt, muses seconds before arrowing Stovall to death: "There was something relaxed and enjoying in his body position, something primally graceful; I had never seen a more beautiful or convincing element of a design"[9]. Strangely enough, the passivity and wailing of the raped Bobby during the assault is more reprehensible to the narrator than the physical appearance and inhumanness of malefactors, which is ostensibly shown when the former's manhood and his place in the group is invalidated in the following terms: "he felt tainted to me"[10]. Scened later, Gentry exhibits an apathetic acceptance of the ruthlessness of natural order and a kind of bizarre amity with Stovall:

I felt, in the moonlight, our minds fuse. It was not that I felt myself turning evil, but that an enormous physical indifference, as vast as the whole abyss of light at my feet, came to me . . . [i]f Lewis had not shot his companion, he and I would have made a kind of love, painful and terrifying to me, in some dreadful way pleasurable to him, but we would have been together in the flesh, there on the floor of the woods . . .[11]

It appears that Dickey was also the foreshadower of almost every backwoods slasher scene in which strayed young city-dweller(s) first irresolutely encroach upon the territory of the enemy. In the following passage, the four townees enter The Griner Brothers' Garage, seeking supplies and help in the downriver trip:

It was dark and iron-smelling, hot with the closed-in heat that brings the sweat out as though it had been waiting all over your body for the right signal. Anvils stood around or lay on their sides, and chains hung down, covered with coarse, deep grease. The air was full of hooks; there were sharp points everywhere - tools and nails and ripped-open rusty tin cans. Batteries stood on benches and on the floor, luminous and green, and through everything, out of the high roof, mostly, came this clanging hammering, meant to deafen and even blind. It was odd to be there, not yet seen, paining with the metal harshness in the half-dark.[12]

I guess what gives Deliverance its terrifying resonance on the level of subconscious urges is the minimal stylistic gradation of sexual horror, and its placement in a certain ideologically contorted territorial universe (the US South) where some forms of behavior might not be baffling or detestable for the persons involved. The behavior of the narrator seems to prove this porno semi-dystopic adaptive attitude. While the events unfolding are traumatic from the perspective of the habitual normalcy of social rules, some sort of tantalizing mysticism of encountered perversion is also involved. The factor that makes every pornography work for anybody is a (hidden) fetish. That the men-raping Benson has a wife adds an aspect of realism to a story that might be otherwise considered purely an exercise in pornographic evil sublime. That's what good pornographers try to achieve: to make the characters and their actions believable despite the setting and generic formulaicism. Relevantly, Samuel R. Delany aims at precisely such skewed realism when it comes to most of his protagonists;when Kidd discovers that the twenty-seven-year-old hunk Tak is sexually involved with a 15-year-old black boy, this is how he reacts: "[s]uch distortion tells me nothing of him, and is only terrifying because so much is unknown of myself"[13]. And much of the sexual iceberg seems to remain hidden considering Tak's bragging confession that he's "gone to levels of perversion" one might have hard time imagining[14], even in such a liberatory space as Bellona.

Nicely executed stroytelling, altogether.


[1] Deliverance p.227
[2] Farmer's Daughters (1976)is, IMO, the unavoidable classic of the genre with its half-retarded boychild, inbred sex coercion at gun-point, the motif of convicts trespassing on a family farm, the atmosphere of bizarro rustic pornotopia and sexploitation.
[3] D. p.40
[4] D. p.22
[5] D. p.151
[6] D. p.95
[7] D. p.95
[8] D. p.100
[9] D. p.161
[10] D. p.111
[11] D. p.154
[12] D. p.57
[13] Dhalgren p.423
[14] Dhalgren p.413

I.

"I am the sweeping tapestry of my sensory and bodily perceptions. I am their linguistic reduction and abstraction, delayed and deferred till they form a wholly different order, called my thought. I am, at the behest and prompting of all these, my memory which forms still another order. I am the emotions that hold them together. Webbing the four, and finally, I am the flux and filigree of desire around them all.

Perhaps, though, I am only the interpretation of all of them that I call reality. (Do I write with my pen? Does another daemon hold the pen and write with it?) Am I the sexual surge and ebb that cannot quite be covered by any of the above, but that impinge on all the others and often drown them? What of the bodily apparati in general, as they fall, pleasingly or painfully, into the net of myself? I am always an animal excess to the intellectual system that tries to construct me. I am always a conscious sensibility in excess of the animal construction that is I. And that is why I am another, why my identity is always other than I."

Samuel R. Delany Longer Views: Extended Essays. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996. p. 150

WILL THIS BE THE LAST IMAGE?

"Delay and Deferral: Body and Interface

[. . .]

It is important to note that a substantial difference between being a "member" of a pay porn site and simply surfing for porn on the Web; and regardless of the growth and gross income of porn sites, many (if not most) people who look at porn on-line are not members of pay sites. Thus, from the perspective of the average viewer, a primary experience of looking for, and eventually at, cyberporn is precisely one of frustration and waiting.[6] The premise of cyberporn is one of immediate gratification, yet the technological systems of the Internet, as well as the interfaces of cyberporn sites, necessitate delay: the delay of logging on, the delay of finding a site, the delay of "signing through" the initial contract, the delay of having the thumbnails load, and then, finally, the delay of waiting for the selected image, sequence of images, or video segment to appear. A high-speed connection may decrease this delay, but cyberporn constantly pushes the boundaries of bandwidth; as soon as the technology can immediately deliver full-frame images,
streaming video comes on offer, with slower load times. Even with a high-speed connection, there is still often delay on the side of the site delivering the content. The technologic of the computer forces these sequential acts of waiting and looking and waiting to become habit, and in so doing, it inscribes repetition and delay as pleasures of a different order. On some level, there is indeed a limit to what the viewer will willingly put up with in order to get what he or she wants, and as such, delay can become frustration. But Web surfing a telling term, offers its own pleasures, regardless of the frustration porn sites both understand and provoke; the structure of many porn sites seems to both direct and cater to the viewer's desires for delay and deferral by allowing the process of searching exist under the aegis of the goal of "getting what they want," but in excess of it. Specifically, the floods of images and the enormous range of selection on any given pay site are there for a reason , and the reason seems to be precisely this process.

One might see this delay as intensifying the pleasure of the eventual visibility of the object by causing the object to acquire an illusory inaccessibility. But it makes more sense to see the satisfaction as taking place in the deferral of satisfaction itself. Seen in this light, the goal exists in part to allow the subject, or a portion of the subject, to rationalize the pleasure of surfing. To imagine the goal, then, is to project into a moment of perfect satisfaction - and the obtaining of a perfect image, one completely adequate to the subject's desire. But in comparison to this imagined perfect image, every image will always remain inadequate, and so the "search" continues. Psychoanalysis generally, and Jacques Lacan's particular articulation of the impossibility of fulfilling one's desire [7],' articulates this point and its implications for subjectivity at some length. But common sense tells us that part of the pleasure in Web surfing is the pleasure of motion and movement either toward an unknown object or away from a boring desk job. The nearly perfect image,the one that comes closest to approximating one's desire - the group-sex shot with the not-too-busty redhead bent over in the front, perhaps still only offers momentary satisfaction; in fact, images close to one's desire can provoke anxiety because they might cause the end of Web surfing. The subject is faced with a choice-will this be the last image? Even if the viewer knows he or she is unlikely to find one better, he will often continue on, forgoing the pleasures of the known for the pleasures (often through frustration) of the unknown. The user constantly shifts on to new images-and in the process, new delays-in an endless slippage of desire in which part of the pleasure derives from habitual repetition and habitual deferral.[8]" (109-110)

from "Going On-line:Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era" by Zabet Patterson in Porn Studies. Ed Linda Williams. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2004. 104-123

I totally agree with the author of this as to the common experience of pornography-viewing phenomenology, including the inevitable yet slick commercialization of psychoanalytical implications of fetish and pixelization of desire. I've never experienced the gritty adventurousness of porn theaters which inevitably failed as anything beyond secret, mostly befouled, homo-eroticism (or at least that's what chronicles tell me) and were the closest we came to the cultural pornographic guerrilla. I'd speak ill of the clean, insulating masturbatization of sexual imagery in home video screenings aimed solely at solitary gratification (which is how most people experience pornography and think about pornography). At its best, masturbation involves the ultimate fantasies of interpersonal freedom and "construction of . . . self"/ves[1], but prevailingly it's just that - purely physiological, manic tension release. Still, there is something wickedly subversive about the socially-revolutionary-satirical origins of pornography and how it has been turned into enslaving desire machine. Pornography, like all images, should feed appetites and prompt experimentation and this, unlike screen violence, does not presume imitative aggression, but in most cases imitative pleasure. It is in-between of those moments of deferral that should ascertain the productivity of our fantasies and sexual intrapsychic scripting. I don't see why women would desire pure eroticism and men pure gratified fantasy. I don't see why nobody would want communal rituals of sex images and pornographic shamanism.

[1]William Simon quoting Burke and Ferenczi, among others in Postmodern Sexualities. London and NY: Routledge, 1996. p.83

SEXUALIZATIONSHIPS via ARTERTAINMENT

REPULSION (1965). An old lady's wisdom: Men want to be spanked and then given sweets. Most are ghoulishly mushy, liquidating themselves into female softnesses and expectations. Others are ghoulishly ossified and sly. Bondsman to their packs, mothers and mothers' dead ringers. Once you cease to care enough and look around sans sexual appetency.

"One way street" (above) and the female psyche on the pavement.

DHALGREN (1975)/HOGG (1995). There is no such thing as an human "alpha male". Unless one changes into a werewolf at full moon, this an archaism and cultural catachresis. Men are not wolves, sexually, the meanest and beastly ones have become emotional hyenas or lice, the weakest have numbed themselves into monogamy. In fiction, of course, they're detestable hyperboles. Hog(g): "I'm shit," [1], Kid(d): "I am a parasite." [2] Consider there actually were such thing as an alpha male, there'd be hardly an adequate phrase to name him, therefore their speech is constituted by pretentious emasculations and poses, at best confusion. This is culture.

PORNOCRACY (2001)/NIERUCHOMY PORUSZYCIEL (2008)/THE KILLER INSIDE ME (2010). Women have a diathesis for aphanisis which has originally been invented for them anyway. Serial killing has been invented for men. The integrity of body and social character has never quite been our scene. In true life, when you call a man an asshole (the prefix "ass" is quite important here, being a hole requires metaphysical depth men are barely capable of), he believes he's integral and he is because he knows of none otherwise. Gay men abhorring female secretions, slasher monsters in need of dismembering. Freud wrote, they love what they do not desire and when they desire they cannot love. Women, instead, would want sexual schizophrenics, Deleuzian "desiring machines" perpetually breaking down in order to work. Cuddling after rape, incessantly. That a man is an identity in fixed construction is a perpetual nuisance. Nobody ever tells us to "be a woman," and "behave ladylike" has already become a behavioral kynicism. Breillat wrote: "The person who must respond to an expectation doesn't have the free will of the Word. That's what makes men desperately nasty and why we must fear them." [3] Solely in sexual terms, domination and sadism are a myth. Lars von Trier allows his female characters to cut off their clitorises, mutilate a penis, and live among cardboard rapists but it's all their will against permissive idiocy of supine male angels. Nicole Blackman sang: "I want matches in case I have to suddenly burn." [4] Heat and matches. There is this thermostatic remarkability: while men vaporize heat on body surface, women tend to keep their physiological warmth at core organs (hence warm heart, cold feet)- what a fine somatic analogy of sexual genderism.

PORNOGRAPHY: SIDE VIEW. What you see: loud boars, good boys caught unaware by the sublime moment of jouissance, lowbrow and highbrow, subtle and primitive, driven and passive, they're all dumb flesh monumentalizations of something beyond themselves. So are women, acting and performing.

DEADGIRL (2008). Zizek wrote: "Dreams are not for those who cannot stand reality, it's rather that reality is for those who cannot stand their dreams."[5]He also iterated Lacan in that sexual intercourse in its breath-taking intensity and intimacy is real to the point of being traumatic. I like the idea that pornography has been invented for us to realize that the subconscious must think intensely about how wrong it is to fuck a social mortuary of taboos in order for our bodies to enjoy it as a fetish. The wasteland of obstinate fe[male] bodies tamed and drenched from fantasies of cheer[leaders] and home-alone[break-ing] teenage daughters[plumbers] vs libidinal delirium of douche bags[nymphomaniacs]. Ethics for the XXIst century: dead meat of fantasy gnaws deadly and contagiously.



Animalization in a world without women in CALVAIRE (2004).


[1]Delany, Samuel R. Hogg. Boulder: Black Ice Books, 1994. p. 114
[2]Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren. Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, Auckland: Bantam Books, 1975. p. 607
[3]Breillat, Catherine. Pornocracy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series, 2005. p.39
[4]Recoil. Want. Mute, 2000.
[5]Zizek, Slavoj. Lacan. Przewodnik Krytyki Politycznej. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2008. p.73