Sex has always been ashamed of her brother.
Sex a mode of coupling machines, the oldest, most fundamental, on which all subsequent USB ports and plumbing and chequing accounts are modeled. Violence is the means of interrupting the flow, of unplugging the machines, individuating them, allowing them to form identities antithetical to the flows, to be cleaved from the gushing social that seeks to assimilate him onto an assembly line, an assembly line of gushing bodily fluids, of spurting orgasms and unquenchable wounds. Sex assembles totalities, and by it we have survived and dominated this planet. It by far precedes all schizophrenia, and was the mother of paranoia.
the dissonance between sex and violence has persisted through all Human time. She is afraid to look to violence for he was her mirror opposite, and therefore they were the same. One built, the other dismantled. the dissonance between them became the land of paranoia and power. First paranoia, the crushing fear that the beauty of love should ever gain a bad reputation, that her face be marred with blood; for beauty to be destroyed is the most barbaric act thinkable. And so power grew to protect one from the other. Christianity grew to protect the interests of the Violent class against Original Sin. And some other time, the hippies rose to the defense of Love, declaring her as a weapon in the war on war.
Sex and violence are not fundamental to reality; they only occupy a Place relative to each other. They are not the only forces that create History, they are not the guiding flows in our consciousness, but they are equally and immensely potent.
true divinity lies at the limit of the two, where they finally meet and become one force. Each limit, sex and violence, must both submit completely to its longtime foe. Sex and violence become .the same force. this is the miraculating machine, where the subject submits utterly to his or her oppressor: when the laborer begins to labor for the love of his boss, when the paranoiac begins to delight in how useful and important he is to Them.
this is the union of Shiva and Parvati, and it certainly need not sound this negative all the time. in fact, rocks my world.
o pain makes use of the same organs as pleasure does.
Both are amoral. I would never demean a woman, but I would tie her to the bed, (or anything else I can come up with) because it feels like one expression of humanity. (at this point, the author wonders who will end up reading this) this is not the only way to having miraculating sex, and many do not enjoy it. I might not. I haven’t been with anyone who tried it with me.
The unification of violence and sex does not have to be violent sex. By my logic, the use of machines in sex is adequate. Bruno Bettelheim could not eat, sleep, or deficate without being plugged into a machine. I cannot fuck without being plugged into a machine (e.g., a vagina. at least some form of lubricating machine: my hand, more and more these days.) But real machines are great to introduce into sex, metal machines, latex machines, rope machines, anything you can get your hands on.
so there it is.
RIP Antonioni.
July 31st, 2007 | #
& RIP Ingmar Bergman
July 31st, 2007 | #
to make it relevant to the post: they were both masters of a Machine, who used a Lens as a coupling device to channel the flows of desire for beauty and truth (these words are inadequate and cliched) through a screen.
July 31st, 2007 | #
YOU KNOW I NEED YOUR CLEVER MOUTH
YOU KNOW I NEED MORE THAN A MOUTH
-welcome
August 2nd, 2007 | #
p.s. WATCH THE WAY IT MOVES HER MOUTH
SEE IT SPEAK AND WONDER HOW
-welcome
August 2nd, 2007 | #
jed,
hey baby. Did you write this?
Anyway, this made me think of impotence: its two forms, sexual and psycho-social. Next, it made me think of a woman I once had sex with who scratched my back really hard–enough to draw blood–when we were having sex. Probably the worst choice I ever made as far as the people I’ve slept with; on the other hand, this was great sex.
Do you really think sex and violence are truly binary opposites? You could be right. I think we live in a fairly binary culture; nonetheless I think it’s a culture in which the boundaries between sex and violence are constantly being torn down. It’s interesting that this inconsistency exists. Love you , baby, can you send me your address I want to send you your essay that I marked
August 5th, 2007 | #
Here’s what I think I was struggling with:
there’s a difference between sex and cold-hearted fucking. Kisses,
Jean-Paul
August 5th, 2007 | #
yeah, I think might be a constructed, artificial binary between the two, but that it’s indoctrinated in all of us muchly. And not repressed at all, but rather constantly emphasized by our culture
August 5th, 2007 | #
What would be a good word for the literary device that means the attribution of desire (or aspects thereof) into machines?
I’ve got so far:
erotobotization
erotomechinization
autonomoerotica
erotomechinization
Help? it’s for my thesis and for my life.
Edit:
..erotomachinization…automoterotizization…
August 5th, 2007 | #
auto means self - which would conjure a nascissitic aspect, as in “self-loving robot.” I’d avoid auto. I do like “erotobot.” it has a good ring. Maybe phrase the sentence so you can say erotobot without the added zation. The ring of the word is paramount.
August 6th, 2007 | #
Jed,
I second ttl’s vote. It has a ring to it. I found this on your old blog.
i was using SPSS 11.0 in order to calculate the standard error of the means of a sample, i realized that i loved my computers flat screen and the lovely way it glows at me. me and the computer; i tore off the plastic from her beutiful body and off with hard angles and hewlitt-packard ensigns; i saw under the plastic a beautiful mess of red, green and white wires and pressed my tongue to the screen and i fucked that computer until i was trembling and my hand on the desk it was beet red i couldn’t stop moving it, i found my pink, naked ass still pumping in and out long after the beautiful moment had ended. the computer gave me a blank glow: i knew she had used me just like all of the other boys who had fucked her. i loved her more, somehow.
August 6th, 2007 | #
wow I love it. jed, i started GR today.
August 7th, 2007 | #
Yeah, the first part of GR is great fun–I love the bannana breakfast and Pirate’s Aneoid. Can’t be beat.
The trouble is, I can’t get rid of the “-ization” because it’s a literary process, not an end product. Like “personification” but you wouldn’t say “personid”–maybe just “personified”, which is just the process in past tense. But I could change it to “erotobotisation” with an s instead of a z
i too had sex with your computer when you weren’t looking.
August 7th, 2007 | #
filthy adulterer, i thought my usb portal was looking rather ravaged.
I started reading your thesis but decided I don’t want to read it til I’ve read a bit of GR, mostly so that I can go into the book without too much preconception. all I can say about the erotobots is that you gotta get that word in there. you know how desiring-mechanization just doesn’t sound as good as desiring-machine? it makes the process more real to be reading about the end product, rather than just its abstract denotation. Maybe introduce the term with the zation/sation, but refer to erotobots from there? Once you’ve introduced a term, I think you’re free to treat it as an accepted and widely understood theoretical concept, granting you full authority for of all of its variants. I say all of this because I think it’s what you want — in the first page of your thesis you mention that you are going to be placing the texts in a comparative engagement. I think the more you name the players and warriors by name, rather than by process (though of course the process needs to be discussed, but only as a matter of necessity, this isn’t where your power is going to lie), the closer you bring your theory into the reality of the thing, and the more you make your reader want to understand what you’re saying. Zations are usually such long words that people don’t want to figure out what they really mean. Kind of how they say ‘body-without-organs,’ not the zation form of the term.
August 7th, 2007 | #
it’s probably a good call…I’ll for sure give it a shot. I want to sprinkle the word all over my thesis–for now it’s just sort of stuck in there for one section…
forgive the completely non-topical question, but when are you going to maine? The 22nd? Any interest in going up a few days earlier and going camping (on the mainland, not MDI) with me and eric? apparently there’s some sort of hill to climb. I’ll ask tyler too if he can get away.
August 7th, 2007 | #
the 22nd is when I get back from vacation, I figured I’d head up that thursday or friday. I don’t have any definite day I need to be back after that.
August 8th, 2007 | #
A few quick thoughts…
I think you could create a more clear distinction between the terms “sex” and “violence” as you conceptualize them here. The ways in which you claim that they converge and diverge are not clear to me, as each term itself can be defined/conceptualized in an infinite number of ways. I think there are many areas of this piece that would benefit (a lot) from more clarification. What exactly do you mean by schizophrenia, for example? Another term with a million and one ideas behind it, as I probably don’t need to tell you, that you drop in as casually as if it were as concrete as the word “pencil.” Pencil, of course, isn’t concrete in itself, but I think it’s far closer than “schizophrenia.”
“For beauty to be destroyed is the most barbaric act thinkable.” ?
“True divinity lies at the limit of [sex and violence], where they finally meet and become one force.” ?
“Both are amoral.” ?
I’d be interested in hearing more about the three statements above. I’m not marking them to say that I disagree with them, but rather to say that I don’t understand exactly what you mean by them. Often, my problem with your writing is that you tend to make sweeping, generalized statements about large numbers of people (entire cultures or all of humankind, even) based on nothing but your own experience and your own perception of the world around you. Rather than coming off as legitimate statements of personal belief, they usually just seem like unfounded and ignorant sociological/historical claims. I don’t mean to imply that you’re an ignorant person, but that there’s something about your writing style that consistently leaves many unanswered questions in my mind. As a reader, I want you to either back up your arguments with reasoning to support those sweeping generalizations, or I want to be convinced that you intend to speak only for and of yourself. That’s not to say that there isn’t a middle ground, but I don’t think that you’ve found it yet. I think the middle ground can be found in very, very careful wording. Does this make sense to you?
August 9th, 2007 | #
Yeah, it’s true about my writing–it sounds overblown and gospel-like. I kind of think it comes from reading too much pompous theory. but on the other hand, I don’t want to litter my writing with a bunch of little weak sounding caveats like “I think…” I pretty much assume that people know that I’m writing from my own experience.
Let’s see…also the problem is that I’ve been living inside the vocabulary and worldview of Deleuze all summer, so a lot of terms like “schizophrenia” have shifted meaning for me, and you’re right that I didn’t bother to explain myself–this was just some half-drunken after-masterbation jotting–schizophrenia is a product of a life lived riding the flows of capital, because capital is deterritorialized and decoded force that can assume any number of identities, can be used for good or evil or anything at all. likewise, the schizophrenic creates multiple names for him/herself, each correlating to a ‘zone of intensity’ of life in a capitalist society. That was a shitty explanation, but there’s a much much better one in the chunk of my thesis I posted a few days ago.
D&G talk breifly about the subject who ceases to be paranoid, and instead joins him/herself with the forces of social production which previously oppressed him/her, and this is called a ‘miraculating machine’ and it is here where god-energy (”numen”) can be found, and I was sort of using that idea to justify a union of sex and violence–a union which is sort of inherantly schizophrenic because it is productive and antiproductive simultaneously. hence “true divinity lies…”
Both are amoral because haven’t we yet gotten beyond the idea of absolute, white-bearded God enforced morality? everything is relative.
“for beauty to be destroyed is the most barbaric act imaginable” : for D & G, the barbaric socius inscribes itself on the physical body or on the body of the earth; instead of writing, they make their mark on each other’s flesh. It’s a mode of social organization, and at the limit of it lies cruelty. (But before that limit, there’s everything like tattoos and piercings, up through genital mutilation etc). So “barbaric” could be seen as a mode of signification–for beauty to be destroyed by violence is one of the most potent acts of social/political meaning–it can mean domination or victory or power etc.
there’s just so much text that can be and has been produced about all this; I think it’s a matter of audience–I wrote this for myself then posted it on the blog, so I didn’t have to define or offer caveats or anything, but I should of thought about your confusions as a reader I guess. so it goes.
August 10th, 2007 | #
I was thinking more about my tendancy to write too big. I like echoey language, and I think that the left needs a more clear enunciation of values and ideas–maybe this doesn’t apply to this piece, but to the long essay I posted a while ago. Fundamentalism and religon are so powerful because they begin on such an absolutist foundation, there can be no questioning of them (sort of like freudianism, actually). But acedemia has sort of wishy-washed us out of any positive platform, so much of what the left does is pure critique and deconstruction that it doesn’t leave anything to fight for. So I feel an impulse to write what I believe in, and write it like a priest.
Let me see if I can find that link again–I know JP just read it, and Alex is really familiar with it, but I’d really like your critical take on it if you have time, Inga:
http://pinkoscopies.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/longessay2.pdf
August 10th, 2007 | #
jed,
yeah what inga says here is basically my criticism of a lot of the essay you linked these folks to. the specifics escape me right now, but if you e-mail me your address i can send you the marked copy via snail mail.
an interesting idea that you could read up on and which might reinforce or at least dialogue with the ideas you’ve laid out here is the idea of filial sacrifice:
A few ancient patriarchal cultures faced a dillemma. That dillemma was that women bore the physical marker of bearing sons and daughters (that a woman is her son’s mother is incontrovertible because the mother gave birth to the son), however the father did not have any similar physical marker (there were obviously no DNA tests to prove fatherhood back then). So, there was a crisis of order or leadership, that being that fathers had no real way to mark their fatherhood. The answer was sometimes to kill the first-born son. Here is an echo of the paradox you talk about above: a son is a symbol of fatherly power in both life and death. That paradox was I’m sure something to be reckoned with–a son was in life the promise of more life (of a longer bloodline), but in death evidence of fatherhood. A lot of Celtic cultures killed the first-born son. They found a Celtic prince in a tar pit in Switzerland or something, the victim of this. There are echoes of this sensibility today, probably (maybe warfare?). Beckett was really interested in this idea, I think I have an essay about it somewhere that was good. I could send it with your marked essay. A good book to read is Dreams of the Burning Son. I think that’s the title.
Later gator.
August 12th, 2007 | #