Remittance Girl's Blog, page 3

The End of the Affair: Erotic hatred in ‘The Best of Enemies’

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Having been liberal on a cellular level all my life, I vowed that I would never give aid or comfort – specifically my sexual favours – to someone holding politically conservative opinions. The one exception to that was William F. Buckley; I always found both his mannerisms and his intellect extremely seductive, even as disagreed vehemently with most of what he said. Meanwhile, I’ve always been in awe of Gore Vidal. Particularly for his ability to mix political and social satire and eroticism.

So, viewing the recently made documentary on the Buckley-Vidal debates, broadcast on ABC as commentary on the 1968 political conventions was always going to draw me. Their exchanges culminated in this exchange which both scarred both men for the rest of their lives.

Vidal calls Buckley a crypto-Nazi and Buckley loses it, calls Vidal queer on national television and threatens to ‘sock him in the face’. Ah, the days when resorting to epithets meant you’d lost! Now it’s what you open with.

The thing is, this was 1968. Buckley can’t possibly have been a stranger or emotionally unprepared to be called a ‘crypto-Nazi’. Similarly, this was long before political correctness. Gore Vidal must have been called a ‘goddamned queer’ more times that he could count. I simply don’t buy that either man was unmoored or mortally offended by the words themselves, but by the man who delivered them.

For his part, I think Buckley was ashamed of himself for losing his cool. In fact, he later went on to admit as much. The question is why it was possible for Vidal to push him into losing it? The erotic writer in me sees, in Buckley’s hatred of Vidal, a sublimation of a strong, visceral attraction.

For Vidal’s part, he really won his point. The topic leading up to the outburst was the brutality of the state actors at the Chicago convention. In pushing Buckley to slurs and threatened violence, he got his ideological opponent to literally make his point for him. He was victorious. And yet it is said that he carried the wound of that exchange permanently, watching a videotape of that debate over and over, for years afterwards. I think his feelings on it must have been very complicated, very ambiguous. Like Buckley, I think he was also sublimating a deep attraction – because admitting it would have been against his political orientation.

That debate was the stuff of wonderful erotic conflict. It’s a thin line between love and hate and, simmering beneath the urbane surface of those televised exchanges, I see an example of how libidinal hatred often is. Of how erotically charged philosophical and political debate used to be. I see what we’ve lost.

I highly recommend the documentary as an examination of the evolution of televised political discourse in the US, for the pleasurable spectacle of watching two highly intelligent men use language with enough rhetorical elegance to make you weep. But most of all, I invite you to speculate on the river of desire running beneath it.

The Best of Enemies is directed by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon, and is available for streaming various places, including Amazon Video, Vudu, and in other locations.

Cold Storage

[image error]Patience was Dr. Viresh Lee’s virtue. In an age when molecular scans and biological reconstitutions were the standard investigative approach to paleobiology, Lee liked to get his hands dirty. This simply wasn’t feasible or legal with newer subjects but, in rare cases, human remains could still be found that had slipped between the cracks in the law, shrugging off the bonds of their rights through the miracle of bureaucratic misstep or a failure in funding oversight.

It was Lee’s hobby to keep track of these forgotten caches of cryogenic detritus. He’d swoop in with his treasured set of antique dissection instruments and examine the body en viscera – in the manner done centuries before, in contact with the actual organic matter itself. The smells, sharp and metallic or intimate and putrescent spoke, he believed, to something in the most primitive part of his own advanced brain. The texture, the form, the existential experience of physically cutting into flesh was thrilling. As a young student, his own academic supervisor had called him a disturbing little creep for his penchant for old school dissection.

When the storage facility issued the first non-payment of services alert for cryotank #2648677993, Lee had been there to relieve them of the legally abandoned contents. Dr. Lee retrieved the monstrous and primitive vat from one of the vast storage vaults established in the Senayan suburb of Jakarta after the Floods of 2258. The expense of cryotank #2648677993’s maintenance and storage had been born by transglobal estate – DJT International Holdings LLC.

Lee perused the provenance data on the exterior display screen. Sadly, some of its earliest lading and storage files had been corrupted or left untransfered. But Dr. Lee sent the entire data nest off to a colleague in Urumqi who specialized in byte reconstruction. However, some of the history of the tank was accessible: the remains had originated at a storage facility in what had once been called Nevada in the old United States of America, transferred to a facility in Southern Morocco after the New Inland Sea had inundated much of the Central North American Basin. From Morocco, it had gone to Jeddah, then to Sydney, then to Havana; it had been relocated further 23 times.

Now it made its very last journey, to Dr. Lee’s research lab in Mogadishu.

These types of human remains storage containers were fairly rare, never having gained widespread popularity. Their exact purpose was not entirely clear, but it had been theorized by several respected archeosociologists that late 20th and early 21st Century humans had sometimes paid to have their corpse stored at very low temperatures in the hope that, at some future date, a cure would have been found for what had killed them. There was poignancy, a sort of desperate romance, Dr. Lee decided, to just how special 21st century humans thought they were. He guessed it had been possible – in those days – to conceive of a single, individual life that way. But once the earth’s population had passed 23 billion, the idea of resurrecting anyone from death became an absurd concept, verging on the obscene. Why would anyone resurrect old life when new life was so rampant, so irrepressible?

Having examined a few of these mid 21st century specimens before, Dr. Lee knew what to expect. The vats had been robustly built and although it was fairly certain that the ideal sub-zero temperatures had not been steadily maintained, the inner seals were unbroken, preserving an anaerobic environment for the organic remains. As he transferred the body from its vat into his custom-designed stabilization bath, Lee noted that the specimen was a large, pale male – approximately 70 years of age. Unhealed but roughly sutured incisions in the chest area suggested that the subject had perhaps suffered some sort of coronary crisis that could not be ameliorated at the time and had resulted in death.

Dr. Lee stroked the bleached flesh with the tip of his finger, tracing the two closed incisions, smiling and shaking his head. It was going to be fascinating to perform the dissection, following the pathways into the flesh made by ancient physicians.

But before he could allow himself that level of destructive investigation, he ordered a full body resonance scan. That way, even after he had degraded the original specimen, he would always have a digital reproduction to refer to.

While human genetics had drifted little in 400 years, there was always the possibility of a surprise. Early on in his career, Dr. Lee had encountered the remains of a woman with three kidneys and prosthetic breasts. These sorts of gross anomalies were not only amusing, but he had written several well-received papers on his forensic exploration of the ancient corpse.

Starting at the subject’s head, the scanner began producing errors from the start. Even before the scan reached the body itself, the specimen’s head hair was returning unexpected readings. Dr. Lee stopped the scan, and tasked the equipment to run standard self-test and recalibration routines.

He glanced at the remains, submerged in the transparent gel. It looked like hair, although the mass was of an unexpected shape and consistency to be sure but, while the sensors indicated that it was organic in nature, the cellular structure suggested that, unlike hair, which is essentially dead follicular tissue extruded through the pores, this mass had a cellular structure resembling muscle fibers. It was possible, under higher magnification, to see a latticework of capillaries. When the scan began to reveal tendons beneath the specimen’s scalp, he stopped the scan.

Dr. Lee knew he was looking at something far, far outside his field of expertise. He needed to consult another scientist. But who might be appropriate? Was this another example of prosthesis, like the breasts he’d encountered? Or… No, this was far more sophisticated. He squinted at magnified paused scan of the cranium. It didn’t look like it was surgical. Maybe he was looking at an example of very primitive bioengineering? And yet it was entirely organic! A mutation? Could it be?

He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice as he contacted only person he could think of who might be able to bring his discipline to bear on this strange anomaly: the eminent cryto-zoologist, Dr. Ioann Ramirez.

“Ioann! It’s Viresh. Are you in town?”

“Just about. My shuttle is just disembarking,” replied Dr. Ramirez. “The Buenos Aires conference was very stimulating, thank you for asking, just in case you wondered,” he added.

“Oh, I apologize. Was it good? How did they receive your paper?”

“Very well. Flesh conferences are still the best way to convince people your ideas are important.”

“Indeed, indeed!” said Dr. Lee. “Look, I have a little quandary.”

“Really? You? I don’t believe it.”

“Neither do I. I would appreciate your opinion on something…er… puzzling.”

“You are teasing me, you old devil. What have you got?”

“Um… a…” Dr. Lee licked his lips. “A deformity, perhaps? No, no. That’s not the right word.”

“Those old dead people, they ate a lot of funny stuff, my friend. I bet it’s a tumor.” In the background, Dr. Lee could hear the roar of jetfoils.

“No. Look, I can’t describe it. Can you come to my lab? Please?”

“Sure. Tomorrow?”

“Can’t you make it any sooner?”

There was a pause on the comms. “What a flirt you are, Viresh! I have to say, you’re awfully disarranged about this! I can be with you in about an hour.”

* * *

While he waited for his colleague, Dr. Lee performed a third self-test and diagnostic run on the scanner itself, resorting in the end to a hard reboot just to make sure all the bases were covered. The scanner had performed a full specimen scan by the time Dr. Ramirez arrived. It hadn’t offered any answers at all, just a thousand more questions.

His friend walked in and dropped his bag by the door.

“Thank god you’re here,” said Dr. Lee.

But Dr. Ramirez was already mesmerized by the luminous spectre of the entire specimen scan, displayed in all its strangeness on the wallscreen.

“Good god, Viresh. What the hell is it?”

Dr. Lee shook his head slowly. “Honestly, I have no idea.”

“It seems to have… ” Dr. Ramirez glanced over at the table of biochem readings, and then the close-up of the cellular structure.

“Yes?” There was an edge of desperation in Dr. Lee’s prompt.

“Well…” Dr. Ramirez shrugged, shook his head. Squinted at the torso, then back at the head. “Those look like…Are those…?”

“Yes?”

Ramirez exhaled and crossed his arms over his chest. “I have to say it. It’s going to sound mad, but I have to say it.”

“Please say it. I’ve been staring at this thing for five hours. I need someone else to say it.”

Ignoring the screen, Dr. Ramirez walked over to the gel vat, plunged his hand into it, and touched the strange organ on the top of the specimen’s head. “Wow. That’s truly strange.”

Without pausing, he moved down the length of the specimen, and stopped at the area of the crotch. “Penile and testicular agenisis?”

“Yes. There’s no scaring at all. Totally absent from…”

“Where they should be,” Dr. Ramirez finished.

Frustrated, Dr. Lee waved his hand and then jabbed at the interface on his desk. “I am qualified to make THAT determination, Ioann! What else? What else?” he demanded.

“It appears as if…” Dr Ramirez inhaled deeply and addressed himself to the ceiling, “this man’s hair is a penis. And…” He shrugged and blew out his breath.

“And?” Dr. Lee’s voice squeaked like something being extruded.

“And he has testicles where his prefrontal lobes should be.”

“Oh, thank god!” bellowed Dr. Lee, “I thought I was going mad!”

Dr. Ramirez pulled out a chair and sat down, hands still dripping gel, eyes fixed on wall screen’s eerie scan. “Where the hell did you find this specimen?”

“It was one of those abandoned crytotank situations.”

“What’s the date on it?”

“2022? Some of the early provenance data is corrupted.”

“I’ve never seen a mutation like this. It’s incredible. How did he manage to survive past infancy? There must have been profound intellectual disability. Poor man!”

“Well, he certainly wasn’t poor or I’d never have gotten my hands on him. He’d have been cremated or buried like any normal person of his time. Plus the dental work was exceptional for the period.”

Dr. Ramirez smiled up at the screen in wonder. “We’re a strange species, Viresh. Infinite variation! Do you know anything more about him?”

Dr. Lee scrolled down the recovered lading data. “Well, not very much. As you can see from the incisions, he was a sick man. Congestive heart failure. They took extraordinary measures to try to keep him alive.”

“Anything else?”

“No. Well… only one thing.”

“Yes?”

“His first name Donald.”

Realism vs Reality: the foreshortening of meaning.

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Still from Gaspar Noé’s “Love”

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian by Tom Sutcliffe on Gaspar Noé’s most recent film ‘Love’. It brings up the interesting question of whether fiction has the capacity to say more to us than reality and, if so, why?

Many women prefer erotica over porn, and they are often painted as prudes. Of course, there are many reasons why women might prefer fictional, textual depictions of the erotic over filmed representations of real sex acts. It could indeed be a question of prudishness, or that the visual precludes the vigorous use of one’s on imagination, or that the vast majority of porn is not produced for women as the target consumer.

But I would like to make an argument for the curious phenomena of how reality and the documentation of the  lived experience can, and often does, have the unexpected effect distancing the onlooker, of making engagement harder, and foreshortening our ability to make meaning.

The news and documentary genres narrativize the real to a greater or lesser extent. To an extent, no remediation of the real escapes some level of fictionalization. The very act of choosing what to show, what angle to film it at, what language to use when writing about it, what format it is presented to the consumer in: all these things are, in a way, fictionalizing forces. This is even truer for genres like pornography, where the presence of the camera and the necessity of satisfying a viewer’s expectations fundamentally makes the sex in porn ‘unreal’. And yet, it doesn’t allow it the possibilities of being fictional.

The remediation of the lived experience, I think, can trigger our innate understanding that what we see is a tiny fraction of what is being experienced. It reminds us that we are always locked out of the unfilmable inner experience. And film, most especially, can fail spectacularly when it attempts to overcome that limitation. The wistful sigh, the far-off stare have become cringe-worthy visual signifiers for the processing of inner experience. This is often equally true when it comes to the textual documentation of the real.

Time is also a problem. Remediation of the real requires us to acknowledge real time. I am watching this event, but it not happening now. By the time I have seen it, it will always be an event that has occured in the past. Even on a ‘live’ broadcast, it is always just over in the time it takes for the signal to travel to my TV set.

In a strange way, the depiction of reality requires that the onlooker, the voyeur, the consumer produce a ‘real’ response. It limits us to admitting that there will always be an artificiality to showing the ‘real’. Its production will always be flawed and incomplete and biased by the presenter.  We often feel we need to keep ourselves at a distance in order to be mindful of how artificiality can sneak in. The minute we are told that something is real is the minute we start questioning just how ‘real’ it is.

More importantly, I believe, consuming ‘reality’ pushes us into an ethical position of forestalling meaning making. Fearing some bias, some artifice, some incompleteness, we instinctively hold off on formulating conclusions, or relating what we’re consuming to our own lives too quickly.

The moment we know that something is fictional, all that hesitation falls away. We feel freer to engage, to identify, to process the story through our own subjective frame. We may demand realism, but we don’t demand and fail to receive truth. It seems far easier to feel the immediacy of a fictional account because we’re not confronted with the possibility that it could ever be immediate. We don’t need to fear bias or artifice because we KNOW what we’re seeing or reading is full of the bias of the creator and the artifice of the artform. We can, in fact we are invited to, indulge in co-authoring the fiction as we consume it, manufacturing additional details, narratives, making assumptions about the inner experience of fictional characters, and revel in the luxury of flagrant meaning-making.

I’m never going to find a filmed act of real sex as erotic as a fictive sexual encounter. The curious fact that is is ‘real’ locks me out of it.

Test

Jennifer awoke to a dull throbbing pain in her chest. She opened her eyes to blackness and felt an immediate flare of panic. She wasn’t at home; this wasn’t her room, her bed. The pain in her breasts, a hot, pulsing, generalized ache, was all that distracted her from the strangeness she found herself in. Someone, something had hurt her.

Instinctively, she tried to pull her arms up to cradle her chest, but her arms wouldn’t move. They felt frozen and useless, numb, behind her back. Another bright bloom of panic surged up her throat and exploded in her head and, this time, no amount of pain could stop its eruption. Jennifer rolled onto her side and screamed into the darkness.

She thought perhaps her own scream had rendered her deaf, for in the moments after the echo of it died, there was nothing but deep silence, as deep and empty as the blackness. Then a short, low grunt breached the stillness. She heard the creak of wood and a click. The room flooded with light. Her face was inches from a blank, white wall.

Many things happened at once. Jennifer rolled onto her other side, and backed herself against the wall. It was then she realized that the deadness in her arms had nothing to do with the way she had slept; they were caught behind her back, tied into a neat, folded package. As she moved her fingers, they brushed against her elbows.

Her eyes, stinging and watering in the sudden onslaught of light, cleared enough to see the source of the grunt. A big, squat man in a badly rumpled suit sat staring at her from a low, beaten-up armchair. She pulled her knees up to cover herself, to make herself small.

“The gaijin princess is awake,” he growled. There was sarcasm and disgust in his voice. The grin he gave her was unkind, and his eyes narrowed.

“Who…who…” she began, but even as the question came out, she knew the answer. She recognized the man in the chair but did not know his name. He’d been the one who had ordered twelve bottles of single-malt; one of the many invisible, servile men who ran about making sure their bosses got what they wanted, whenever they wanted it.

At the club, for the last couple of days, he had pestered her to leave the table she was booked to serve and join the crowd of fawning hostesses at Shindo’s table. They’d frequented the club for more than a week, demanding attention, bullying the other customers and generally throwing their weight around. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence at the Blonde Chicks bar. From time to time, some jumped-up, arrogant bunch of Yakuza pricks would monopolize the club’s facilities, but sooner or later, they’d always get bored and leave.

She had told him, politely but firmly, to piss off. This little shit, who couldn’t afford an hour of her time on a good day, who sat in front of her now, sneering, had obviously decided to get even. The panic returned, swimming through her gut like an eel. She’d heard stories—she’d always assumed they were urban myths—of Western hostesses getting snatched and murdered, but she’d never really believed it.

The realization that she was probably going to become just another urban myth struck her as, somehow, pathetic. A pathetic end to a pathetic year; long gone the romantic notions of the mysterious Orient, of tea houses and geisha, of Shinjuku Gyoen and the wannabe rock gods in Harajuku and Yoyogi Park. Six months on, if Jennifer never saw another bowl of ramen, it would be too soon. The cramped apartment she shared with four other Western hostesses, the groping on the subway, and the nasty calls of “Patsukin “ in the street. The job at the Blonde Chicks was

Advent

[image error]Immanence hissed in her skull. Damaris had overfilled the afternoon with tasks, determined not spend it in a state of anticipation. Now her mascara was clumping lashes that were suddenly too thin. Her lipstick bled into the fine crevices at the edge of her lips. Had they been there yesterday? Her bra felt too tight, her heels too high. Why was she putting herself through this shit?

On the dresser, her mobile buzzed and danced sideways: not a call, just a message. “In a taxi. On my way.” That put an end to the pissing about. There would be no backing out, no out-of-the-blue emergency, no apologetic cancellation. Damaris slipped the phone into her purse, but fatalism pushed her out the door of the flat.

The street was alive. People strolling in the twilight. The old buildings losing the heat of the day to the shadows. Damaris forced herself to slow down as she reached the Alameda and slid into the crowd waiting at the cross-walk. Someone was wearing too much cologne; the kind mothers used to slather on their kids after bath time. To her left, an old man in a pale linen suit rummaged in his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and blew his nose noisily. To her right, a twenty-something woman with a bad dye job was jabbering away at an impassive looking boyfriend.

“I told her. Cook your own dinner, bitch! That’s what…” The light changed, the crowd convulsed and Damaris crossed over the four lanes of heat-rippled asphalt.

To Damaris, this city had always been about cycles. Of light and dark, of winds and still air, of noisy morning bustle and sweltering afternoon silences. Heat and reprieve. Heat and reprieve.

It had been scorching the day her train had pulled out of the station and, from the open window of the carriage, she had watched Lena on the platform, waving, growing smaller. For Damaris, youth had been all about leaving. She had not even missed her lover; the world beyond this city had been so big and so distracting. Now she could not comprehend how her heart hadn’t shattered at that parting. Lena, pulling strands of red hair from the corner of her mouth, pale lips pursing at the tartness of wine, skin that smelled like new milk and a cunt that tasted of oranges – those tender morsels of love had followed Damaris to so many cities through the years, survived the pyre of so many subsequent lovers. Keepsakes lodged in the marrow of her bones, remembrances brined in time.

Twilight stole colour from the broad and gaudy shop windows on Calle Larios. The street was crowded with shoppers and people out looking for an evening meal. Of course, the Bar Central had closed years ago – now it was a chain store selling hair accessories. But through the flurry of emails, that’s where they’d agreed to meet, refusing time its due.

She stood just outside the door of the shop, cursing herself now for not choosing a less crowded spot, peering through the pedestrians in both directions, looking for that coppery hair.

“Hi, hi!”

Damaris swiveled at the sing-song Scandinavian voice to face a tall woman with deep creases in her tanned and freckled face and an impossibly broad smile.

“Jesus. Where’s… where’s your hair?”

“It went grey so I got rid of it.” The woman passed a hand over her cap of silver brush. “What? You can’t love me without it?”

“Fuck, of course I can.” Damaris wrapped her arms around Lena and, grinning like a lunatic, pressed her face into the crook of her neck. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

Lena pulled out of the embrace and pointedly gazed down into Damaris’ eyes. “Then kiss me, properly. Just to prove it.”

Private Lives and the Digital Panopticon

[image error]In a recent essay on Britain’s “Snooper’s Charter” and the state’s right to intrude in the name of keeping us safe, Simon Jenkins wrote this: “Confidentiality in human relations is integral to personal freedom.”

It’s just sitting there, at the end of a paragraph, like a throwaway sentence, but there’s nothing throwaway about it. It’s one of those adamantine truths that deserve deep and considered contemplation. I considered where I should post this essay because – at least superficially – the question of privacy is a political one. It doesn’t seem to intersect with eroticism. This is a good opportunity to clarify what I mean when I use the term and underscore how, in its philosophical sense, privacy is what defines the boundary between the individual and society, between the self and the state.

The Digital Dimension

One of the problems with our public discussion of how we are surveilled by the state in the name of national security is a smearing of the boundaries between public and private. For the most part, the UK’s citizens do not find the many thousands of public CCTV cameras problematic because the overlook public areas. The internet is a more difficult terrain to understand. Most Social media is most definitely public, and yet there are parts of it – direct messages on Twitter and private messaging on Facebook – in which the user assumes their communication is private. Similarly, the online signing of a petition might be a public digital act, but a donation to a political organization or a cause might be assumed, if one checks the ‘anonymous donor’ box, to be private. When I read an article on the Guardian website, I am making the assumption that it is not a public act, but when I comment, it is. The UK government proposes (and has already done so, apparently, for years) to force servers to store and, if required, divulge a record of a user’s browsing history. While this may have always been information that someone had, somewhere, for some period of time, it is not an unreasonable assumption on the part of internet users that their movements around the net were basically private. Private in the sense that where they went and what they browsed was not the state’s business.

Privacy on the internet has always been a mental construct rather than a physical fact. But that doesn’t invalidate it. The information might be retrieved, but the state should have to show compelling reasons – proof of criminality or criminal intent – in order to do so. In reality, there is no way to absolutely insure digital privacy; there is every reason, however, to require the state to show irrefutable just cause before it deconstructs the fantasy of that individual’s privacy.

Let me use a physical metaphor. Say I have a private diary I have left out on my desk, and I step out of the room for a few moments. You do not have an ethical right to look in it. It doesn’t matter that it is accessible to you, there on the table for you to open and read. It says ‘diary’ on the cover, and our culture has determined that diaries are private until they are published. Your potential access to it does not give you the right to open it and read it while I’m out of the room. If you do, you have fundamentally betrayed my trust. If you suspect me of being a serial killer – if there is ancillary evidence that what is in that diary might be an admission of my criminality – then you have a compelling reason to betray that trust. But you do not have the right to go around opening everyone’s diary just in case a very small number of diarists are serial killers.

What the governments of the US and the UK and many other countries have shown  – over and over – is that they do not feel bound by the culturally normative limitations that individual citizens maintain. They have opened your diary and read the contents without any compelling reason to do so. When caught red-handed betraying that implicit trust, they inevitably use the excuse of ‘national security’ or ‘protecting kids from pedophiles’; those are the two most oft-used defenses for their betrayal of our trust.

The boundary between the private and the public is a fundamental element in how we, as social creatures, navigate our inner and outer world. Certain parts of our online behaviour is obviously public, certain parts are obviously private. Let us not be disingenuous or allow the state to be so: we know very well what is not the state’s business and so does the state. Nothing less than an existential threat to our society, our nation, our social order, should be able to excuse the breaching of those boundaries. Neither terrorists nor a clutch of pedophiles represent anything approximating the existential threat that should be required to force us to consider redefining those boundaries.

The Private Self and the Public Persona

There are many theories about the self – what it is, how it comes to be, what constitutes it. Some even refute that there is such a thing. However, I want to approach this pragmatically. The vast majority of us have a conception of a self on a continuum. We see ourselves as having a completely private side (what we think, know, feel but don’t communicate to anyone), what we think and feel and communicate to a very few people we think of as intimates or record somewhere in privately stored archives (i.e. papers in your possession, a file on our computer, an audio or videotape if you’re oldskool), and the public self we present to the world.

The convergence of technology and the marketization of the individual has changed our understanding of the self. Where once the experience of reading a book in a chair might be considered a private experience, this is no longer necessarily the case. If you read online or on a wifi enabled table reader, what you are reading, what page you’re on, how long it takes you to read it, etc. is information all converted into data that is, theoretically, accessible to others as evidenced by a server that logs your browsing data, SEO information or Amazon’s ‘pay-per-page’ model. Admittedly, no one can hack into how you feel about what you’ve read, but its getting mighty close. A lot of software currently deployed to anticipate customer desires and target the marketing you see online is, in effect, guessing at how you feel. Technologically, we are at the mercy of algorithms that try to read our minds.

To pretend that this doesn’t have an effect on us, or change the way we conceive of ourselves or present ourselves to others is to deny a fact. We are constantly encouraged to review the products we buy online, give our opinions of the books we’ve read or the movies we’ve watched, rate the photographs we see, comment on each other’s social media contributions. We are flattered by a system that not only solicits, but seems desperate to hear our opinions, impressions, judgements, our thoughts. When online, we are pressured to expose our inner thoughts in order to establish our worth as digital personas. And the more unfiltered and intimate the thoughts we expose, the more approval we receive for it.

Fill out your profile, rate this book, review this product, respond to this blogpost in the comments area. The pressure is constant to leave our traces all over the internet in order to be seen to be being by others. The fact that all this data is solicited in order to turn it into a mechanism for marketing or for gathering together large volumes of free content that can be packaged and exploited hardly ever occurs to us.

In the meantime, our economy is constantly demanding we productivize ourselves. Our CVs, Facebook, LinkedIn pages, the posts we make on twitter, all serve as a way to present ourselves to employers, our peers, government entities, etc. for their approval or disapproval. So, we’re not just being pressured to judge. We are also being pressured to present ourselves for the judgement of others. Of course, throughout history, in the analogue world, this was always  – to some extent – the case. But that interaction, in digital form, makes the self we present, the data we divulge, much easier to analyse, form narratives about, and draw conclusions from.

10 days of my browsing history will tell you more about me than I would be willing, if confronted, to divulge to anyone. It would not take much of a psychologist to figure out what my sexual orientation is, my political leanings, my aspirations, my weaknesses. And not much of a manipulator to figure out where to put pressure on me to act in a certain way. It is a very small step from knowing who someone is, to figuring out what makes them tick and, finally, exerting subtle but very real control over them.

We often conceive of our digital life as being a passive, one-way thing. But it’s not. The subtle pressure of tags and classifications slowly but surely nudges the individual to conform and fit in more completely with the tag or classification allocated to them. I’ve noticed it on Fetlife. If you classify yourself as ‘submissive’ because that is, primarily, how you conceive of yourself, it is not difficult to get caught up in the discourse that surrounds that community of submissives, and where the portrait of a ‘real submissive’ is presented as a model against which you measure yourself. And whether that means you are under pressure to conform to something closer to the model or to reject it deviate from it, it is pressure nonetheless, and it does affect you.

When we create an ‘online persona’ – even a public one, it is questionable as to how much of that persona is of our making, and how much is a product of having to choose from the ‘labels’ offered to us and the prevailing digital models to which we are algorithmically compared? If we fool ourselves that we are the ultimate authors of the public entity we present online, we are indulging in a narcissistic fantasy while being manipulated into a box.

If You Don’t Have Anything to Hide, You Don’t Have Anything to Worry About

Edward Snowden said: “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” But it’s actually worse than that. What is true for Schrodinger’s Cat is also true for us; the knowledge that we are being unceasingly observed changes what we do, what we say and, eventually, who we are are a fundamental level. If it were not true, belief in a judgmental and omniscient god would have no impact on believers. If it were not true, Foucault’s theory of the Panopticon would hold no water. If it were not true, most of the ways in which we induct children into the social order simply wouldn’t work. The fact that Big Brother may be watching doesn’t just stop us from behaving in the ways Big Brother wants us to behave. Subconsciously, it situates us as performers, constantly ‘performing’ ourselves for Big Brother.

This is nothing new. We have always at least partially ‘performed’ ourselves to a public world. But when the boundaries between private and public erode, the implications of how this affects what we think of as our private, authentic self becomes frightening. Because there are parts of our private selves that are not amenable to absolute conscious control. We don’t author our own psyches. Let me offer a rather dramatic example: no one makes a conscious decision to be aroused by pedophilic thoughts. We can and should be held to account for our acts, but how do we hold someone to account for their thoughts? Similarly, a person who becomes enraged by racist injustice cannot be held to account for their rage – their emotional response to a situation is not a choice. They may, however, be held to account for what they have allowed that rage to inspire them to do, if it is criminal. I realize I may be stating the obvious, but I feel it is important to underscore the fundamental difference between private and public, between thought and act. Because as technology becomes more sophisticated, more convenient, more accessible and immediate, we seem to find it hard not to blur that difference. It has now become very murky as to whether it is illegal to simply visit a site containing ISIS propaganda.

Now admittedly, clicking on a link is an act. But what happens when we develop technology that effects a link to information based on an eye movement? Where does a thought end and an act begin?

National Security and For the Sake of the Children

Hopefully, I have made a convincing argument for how the erosion private boundaries is taking a toll  on how we understand boundaries themselves, the private vs the public sphere, the ethics of trust, our concept of self and other, the gap between thought and action. These are truly dramatic changes that will impact the fabric of our society in ways we can’t even conceive of yet. Governments are demanding the right to breach our privacy, to effect omniscient surveillance, in order to protect us.

I want you to consider whether all the terrorist attacks in the US and the UK, taken in their totality, or all the victims of child abuse, could justify the kind of fundamental changes that will result from their incursion into our private online lives. I don’t want to see any more victims of terror or see any more children’s lives ruined by predators, but I simply do not accept that the price we should pay to be safe is the demolishing of the authentic private self or individual liberty. In fact, I’d argue that to do this is to do the terrorists jobs for them.

What I suspect is that our governments will take whatever control and power we can be persuaded to afford them. Power, by its nature, requires more power, and it will use any strategy at hand to get it.

The Reader / Writer Conspiracy & the Hackneyed Ellipsis of the Real

[image error]How might fictional prose be framed in terms of Lacan’s Three Orders? Lacan described the human psyche as operating on three different ‘orders’ or registers: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As speaking beings, we live in all three orders simultaneously, but not always consciously. They are experiential modes –  ways of experiencing reality and ways in which reality affects us – rather than the experiences themselves. For more on this, go here for a nice, concise summary go here.

The Symbolic order is entered as a child acquires language. Not just language in the sense of verbal ability, but all the analytical, law-bound, structured and hierarchical rules that interacting with others in a social order requires. Within the Symbolic order, language doesn’t just constitute the world around us, it constitutes us, too, by imposing definitions and limitations. So, the communication of ideas via the written word and how the meaning of that text is constructed through the Symbolic order is obvious, as is formalised narrative structure and the constraints of genre. The text itself is situated within literary and cultural entertainment economies. Similarly, both the writer and reader have their respective roles to play as both producers and consumers of the text.

The Imaginary order is not about imagination, but about image. We enter it as babies the moment we progress from simple need to demand. Needs (warmth, comfort, food) are met in the womb before they are even perceived as a lack. Barring disaster or an absent caregiver, a baby’s needs for the same are met when the caregiver is alerted to them (Through a cry, a wet nappy, or on a schedule). Demand arises when we want something ‘more’ than what we need. This is the beginning of desire and fantasy – and also the trigger for the acquisition of language: of learning to want what we’re taught to want, of settling for something less than the nameless thing we yearn for, and of the creation of fantasies about how desires might be satisfied. It is important to note that Lacan makes a very great distinction between need and demand. We often say we ‘need’ something – especially sex – but in reality, we desire it. No one ever died from from being denied sex. The Imaginary order also involves the formation of ego – the paradox of seeing oneself in the mirror and recognising it as you and yet not you. It is the external, beloved you, seen from an admiring distance, as if you were someone else recognising you. This process of the co-evolution of the ego ( the ‘me’ of the Imaginary order) and the subject (the ‘I’ of the Symbolic order) is a complex and alienating one. As it relates to narrative fiction, the Imaginary determines much of how both the writer and the reader internalise and visualise the characters and events of a story, relating narcissistically, emotionally to both. Kris Pint notes that “fantasy forms a shield against the pure, unmediated enjoyment of the libidinal being, and at the same time it is a construction intended to recuperate something of that enjoyment” (Pint 37).

The Real is our primal state of being. Before birth, in the womb, there is no structure to reality: no sense of self and other, no meaning. There is only raw, unmediated sensation and need, unimagined and unprocessed by fantasy, unordered by language. Nonetheless the Real is with us all our lives, irrupting into our world during traumatic or sublime experiences that take us beyond language.

If sublime or limit experiences resist language in real life, the same holds true for fictional accounts. I would argue that the Real plays a subliminal but vital part in the process of engagement with a fictional text in terms of mutually acknowledged and understood failures or silences.  The clichéd memes so common to erotic fiction might serve, not only as shield, but also as mutually understood placeholders. The formulaic fantasies and overused metaphors may function not as examples of poor prose, but as flags for the presence of an absence, as ‘points the capiton,‘ pointing the cringe-worthy signifier to an experience of bliss that both the writer and reader mutually acknowledge language cannot capture. Even something as physically concrete as an orgasm is only poorly represented in language and has been – as critics have so often pointed out – the site of the worst examples of purple prose. But for writers and readers, sharing that lived experience and understanding of the physical and affective aspects of it, the clichéd language or the threadbare metaphor acts as an invisible ellipsis present but unprinted in an account of a climax.

References

Pint, Kris. The Perverse Art of Reading. Rodopi, 2010. Print.

From Sin to Superficiality: Erotic Narratives

[image error]Erotic fiction is often narrated in first person, or third person proximate, attempting to give the reader an experience of the story’s eroticism from inside the mind and the body of the narrator. In this way, it has the capacity to do what image-based pornography (which almost always situates the viewer as voyeur) cannot do; more than simply showing the reader what has occurred, it seeks to inform the reader of how it felt physically and emotionally. Some of the harshest criticism levelled at the genre stems from these attempts to ‘speak’ these experiences which Lacan and others have insisted cannot be spoken (Fink 162).

Erotica, it is said, resorts to ‘purple’ prose, often using cliched poetic devices to communicate the thoroughly mixed up stew of sensation, emotion and signification (O’Hagan). Even though prose featuring other, non-sexual, limit experiences – a fist fight, mourning the dead, triumph over adversity – often resort to similar over-used metaphor, hackneyed, predictable adjectives and adverbs, and threadbare symbolism, the erotica and romance genres seem to come in for special critical humiliation. This is, I think, less a comment on the literary talent of the writers in the genre, but rather a reflection of how even now – in a world inundated with explicit sexual images – written attempts to communicate that ‘unspeakable’ intensity of experience still embarrass us. For all society’s pretence to openness, to tolerance, eroticism – not sex, not the mechanics or the flesh or the bodily fluids, but the inner experience that so taxes our ability to relate it – frightens us.

As Slavoj Zizek has said regarding visual pornography: you can have the explicit sex or a good story, but you can’t have both and, moreover, the very impossibility in communicating eroticism results in pornography’s absurdly codified representations of sex:

“The ultimate proof of this unrepresentability is provided precisely by pornography, which pretends to ‘show everything’; the price it pays for this attempt is the relationship of ‘complementarity’ (in the quantum physics meaning of the term) between the narrative and the sexual act: the congruence between the filmic narrative (the unfolding of the story) and the direct display of the sexual act is structurally impossible: if we choose one, we necessarily lose the other” (Zizek 226).

Some postmodern literary writers, like Martin Amis, Michel Houllebecq, Kathy Acker and Charlotte Roche have studiously opted for hyper-clinical or abstracted representations of sex, cleansed of all poetic imagery or cogent narrative, in an attempt to circumvent this impossibility. But I argue that this accepts and bases its efforts on the conclusion that eroticism has no narrative or meaning or that any meaning or affects ascribed to the erotic experience are constructed falsehoods. This assumes that the meaning ascribed to the written remediation of any experience isn’t subjective and unempirical. While it is undoubtedly true that no text or image – no matter how artfully executed – can ever be a faithful, holistic reproduction of a powerful lived experience, why are we so tolerant of the multiplicity of failed literary attempts to do this so when the experience being related is non-erotic? Why do we have so much disdain for our attempts when it is? And, most importantly, why do those who so absolutely dismiss the possibility of any single, immutable, universal truth, single out of the writing of erotic experiences as especially problematic?

A world full of explicit pornography – that spurns meaning-making or emotion in favour of pure sensation – is indeed far more effective than a puritanical one at preventing us from contemplating our erotic natures or assigning them any lasting or deep value in our lives. We have shifted from considering our eroticism a site of grave transgression to situating it as a fun and meaningless pastime. At least sinners cast a significant shadow on the horizons of our subjecthood. Playful fuck-bunnies are eminently dismissible and disposable, despite their commercial potential; they’re also conveniently interchangeable and replaceable.

I suggest that we must start, as writers of the erotic, from a place of admission: we will fail to truthfully relate all, most or even some aspects of any given erotic narrative that attempts to approach realism, but this is no reason not to make the attempt. And, although we have an obligation to attempt originality and avoid cliche and hyperbole, we also have an obligation to remind our culture that, no matter how uncomfortable to acknowledge it, our erotic desires and experiences play a very central part in the meaning and value we ascribe to our selves and those we interact with. Our erotic urges inform and influence the actions we take and the decisions we make. Attempts to demonise or superficialise narratives of human eroticism both do us a disservice. Both succeed in dissuading us from the contemplation this essential part of our nature with the gravity it deserves.

References

Fink, Bruce. Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
O’ Hagan, A. “Travelling Southwards. Review of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James.” London Review of Books (Online) 34.14 (2012): 29.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 2008.

Libidinous Zombie: The delicious marriage between horror and eroticism #LZ #8

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The delightful Rose & Dayv Caraway are the people behind The “Kiss Me Quick’s” Erotica Podcast and “The Sexy Librarian’s Blog-cast”. This Halloween, they’re producing an erotic horror anthology called Libidinous Zombie. 8 writers, each offering an exploration of the intersection between eroticism and horror.

The collection features work by

Allen Dusk

Jade A. Waters

Janine Ashbless

Malin James

Raziel Moore

Tamsin Flowers

Rose Caraway

My contribution to the collection is a short story called The Night The Frank Scored.

For a lot of people who enjoy the milder, more utilitarian side of erotica, the intersection between eroticism and horror may seem laughable, in poor taste, or plain politically incorrect. But beneath the seemingly exploitative surface is a psychological reality we are unwilling to own: there is an aspect of our erotic drive that seems so obsessional, so relentless, so capable of destructive or self-destructive behaviour as to destabilize our sense of ourselves as unified, sensible, thinking beings.

This is Freud’s ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’; what Lacan called the ‘Lamella’, described by him and others as the ‘undeadness’ of the drive. We’re not talking about a sexual biological imperative that has its natural rhythms of arousal and disinterest, or the erotic desire we clothe in countless symbolic narratives. This is hunger beyond sense or language, ignorant of limits or civility. Both erotic and horrific, the libidinous zombie that lives inside all of us is only really addressed at the intersection of horror and eroticism.

Keep an eye out for this marvelous collection.

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#9? We had to kill that motherfucker

 

 

 

The Safety of Desire

“desire is a defense, a defense against going beyond a limit in jouissance” Jacques Lacan, Ecrits

For Lacan, desire and fantasy are the life- and self-preserving strategies we use to keep us from slipping into a mindless and self-destructive pursuit of jouissance. Desires and the fantasies we construct around them are firmly rooted in language. No matter how wild, how obscene the scenario we construct, it is always possible for us to communicate it – at least partially. It’s not as if our erotic fantasies arrive fully formed in our minds from the start. Our sex drive may be biological, but our erotic fantasies are not epigenetic; they’re culturally determined, disseminated through symbolization – images and text. Indeed we must do so if we are to have any hope of finding a willing partner to play along with it.

Medieval monks didn’t fantasize about nuns in seamed stockings and high-heels. First there had to be stockings and high heels, someone to warn you against looking at them lustfully, and someone to tell you how desirable they are anyway.

It seems counter-intuitive to conceive of desire and fantasy as a defense against anything. All societies have sexual taboos and, ostensibly, any sexual desire might be conceived as anti-social. But according to Lacan, the very fact that they can be spoken of, written about, remediated in photographs or on video, means that they are a safer outlet for the drive that powers them than the alternative: jouissance.

What makes them safer is the very imperfection of language. No matter how precisely we use words, no matter how carefully we photograph or video something, we can never convey the entirety of the thing, the experiential totality of it. So, it is this fault at the core of language – the slippage between signifier and signified – that keeps us safe from staring into the blinding sun of the drive.

Although, according to Mari Ruti, both desire and jouissance are ‘agitated by the drive’, jouissance is closer to the mute, scorching, ego-destroying real of it. And it is this that Bataille is discussing when he speaks of eroticism. Not the langauge-rich diorama of our sexual fantasies, but something far more sublime and terrifying.

Theorists are not great storytellers. They seldom show us the human continuum of the erotic. As humans, our erotic interests range from mild interest to self-destructive obsession. Many of the 20th Century’s canonical erotic writers, such as D.H. Lawrence, Marguerite Duras, Anais Nin, Angela Carter courted censorship and prosecution to bring us stories of erotic experiences that spanned the whole continuum. More recently, the commercialization and formularization of erotic writing and sex-positive activist movements have resulted in e-bookshelves full of ‘erotica’ that does not convincingly look into the dark heart of jouissance.