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that would confirm them in the comfortable neuroses of their subjectivities, but the singular risk of the fetish, withdrawn from the very possibility of intelligibility and meaning.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.