Post Porn Politics

Contents

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Intro Tim Stttgen

Bubu de la Madeleine Bruce La Bruce Shu Lea Cheang

103 117 131 139

Ejaculatory Punctuation: The Cum Shot as Period, Ellipsis, and Question Mark Murat Aydemir Erotic/Exotic Race and Class in French Gay Ethnic Pornography Maxime Cervulle Fizzle Out in White Postporn politics and the deconstruction of fetishism Katja Diefenbach Unbecoming: Pornography and the Queer Event. Lee Edelman The Luck of the Displaced Feeling. The Invisible Hand, Penis Surrogates and Sex. Stephan Geene Soft Arousal Latex Party: Web Arousal and Porno Exhaustion. Katrien Jacobs and Chantal Zakari

Werner Hirsch 13 Maria LLopis Girlswholikeporno 19

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Elizabeth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle and Cosey Fanni Tutti Post Porn Brunch 151 Todd Verow 161 169 177

25 Tobaron Waxman William Wheeler 33

181 47 187 53

Outro Tim Stttgen Impressum

Libidinal Parasites and the Machinic Excess: On the Dystopian Biosphere of Networks Matteo Pasquinelli 59 The Architecture of Porn. museum walls, urban detritus and stag rooms for porn-prosthetic eyes Beatriz Preciado 67 Viva Mc Glam. Is Transgenderism a Critique of or Captulation to Opulence-driven Glamour Models? Terre Thaemlitz 75 Libidinal Parasites and the Machinic Excess: On the Dystopian Biosphere of Networks Michaela Wnsch 87

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1-9 Interviews

Post Porn Politics

Katja Diefenbach

Fizzle Out in White Postporn politics and the deconstruction of fetishism

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Post Porn Politics

The name of the political The past of postpornographic politics

My thesis is that the political presupposes the contingent advent of an event that allows for the coming together of different dissident practices, increasing their mutual connections, whereby the normal distributions of places and functions are interrupted and the chance of exceeding the existing order emerges. Through these connections a militant element is produced in the subject, while the latter is displaced by the event traversing it. That is to say, there is no preexisting subject of politics; the political cannot be substantialised in something subjective, human, or living, nor can it be objectively founded in the advancing contradictions of capitalist valorisation, wherein its tendential breakdown is supposed to be inscribed. Instead, the political is nothing other than the historically specic effectiveness of a complex of connections between heterogeneous radical practices that affect and, in the best case, intensify each other. The potential for a rupture depends on the composition of these connections and the non-authoritarian perspective of the struggles, or rather on a vigilant sensibility and preparedness to oppose authoritarian pragmatics. The political has to contain multiple social differences the force of 1968 derives from the extreme multiplicity of the positions involved while combining a micropolitical with a macropolitical dimension. In the microdimension, the political is located in the everyday as self-organised struggle against unbearable features of capitalist and governed life and as momentary intensity of an already transformed situation that allows the evasion of those features as well as the experience of brief moments of minoritarian happiness. The macropolitical dimension deals with the question of organisation and self-management in the tradition of council communism in order to bring continuity to a struggle or to a sudden transformative moment by constructing and instituting basic democratic organs, giving militants the chance to distance themselves from the political act so as to avoid the burden of constant self-mobilisation. Both dimensions are combined with specic dangers: the rst, especially today, being a transformation to identitarian politics and commercialised life forms; the second being the development of bureaucracy or if there is no way of distancing oneself from the political the reemergence of cadre subjectivity. Both political dimensions face power strategies that mark and anticipate them, strategies which are also characterised by a mutual conditioning of micro and

In this sense Ondines hymn to a delirious 1965 testies to a specic political concatenation characterised by a striking collection of pro-fetishistic subcultural strategies which subsequently vanished. The lifestyles, club nights, performances and movies of this pre-Stonewall, part homosexual, part dissident sexual subculture, loosely connected to the emerging minoritarian struggles as well as to the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist approaches of the New Left, were pro-pornographic, pro-fetishistic, attracted by and attracting through the glamour of commodities, playing with the sex appeal of things, owers, clothes, their inscrutability, their seductive passivity, their namelessness, fetishistically devoted to beauty, stardom, Hollywood, insisting on and simultaneously displacing and reappropriating the capitalist promise of a happy life rather than being disgusted by the alienation that a commodity-based society supposedly produces. In early queer subculture the showing of beauty was not seen as an act of delusion, the shredding of a veil that had to be torn up to reveal the antagonistic truth behind. As evidenced by the lms of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith or John Waters, or as a late echo by Fassbinders Querelle, beauty was directly combined with experiences and images of despair, violence, decay and fragility. These connections between beauty and dirtiness, or, in the tradition of the Theatre of the Ridiculous, between porn and scenes of failing, silly sex, are not made in order to provoke the guardians of normality, to shock the middle classes who are to demonstrate their appreciation through negative attention, or to ridicule the showing of sex. They are made to produce an immanent pleasure of non-naturalised, non-nurturing, nonlove-dedicated, non-reproductive sex. In this sense postporn politics had already entered the present a long time ago, but due to the Marx-inspired anti-fetishism of the New Left and the essentialist threads in the feminism of the 1970s and 80s, it has been partly forgotten. In the following text I want to trace a specic line of the theory of fetishism that stretches from Marxs critical concept of the commodity fetish as a phantasmatic but actual

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Ondine (Robert Olivo), who appeared in several movies directed by Warhol and Morrissey in the mid 60s, said about the year 1965, At that point in my life, in everybodys life, that was the culmination of the 1960s. What a year. Oh, it was splendid. Everything was gold, everything. Every color was gold. It was just fabulous. [...] Any time I went to the Factory, it was the right time. Any time I went home, it was right. Everybody was together, it was the end of an era. That was the end of the amphetamine scene, it was the last time amphetamine really was good. And we used it. We really played it. 1 Of course, Ondine is exaggerating; 1965 was not the last time amphetamine was good. What made this time so splendid was a special political concatenation which had almost reached its peak: a combination of, rstly, new forms of militant political activism that had broken with the Leninist model; secondly, new forms of cohabitation, spending time in a non-calculated and unmeasured way, dwelling in communes, not working, taking drugs, experimenting with unknown ways of doing things together; and thirdly, early queer politics decades before the term was used for nonidentitarian gender politics, drag, the dismantling of gender dualism, demonstrating ones feminist dissidence or homosexuality. Ondines magic encounter with this rare concatenation, which was only actualised in special moments of a time that is remembered as 1968, hints at the problematic status of the political, which is important to take into consideration when discussing what a postpornographic politics might mean.

macropolitics. As Foucault has written, no local center, no pattern of transformation could function if, through a series of sequences, it did not eventually enter into an over-all strategy. And inversely, no strategy could achieve comprehensive effects if it did not gain support from precise and tenuous relations serving, not as its point of application or nal outcome, but as its prop and anchor point. 2 Thus the political is determined by a type of relationality of its practices, the power of which lies in the connections, and by a series of unsolvable tensions, including the tension embedded in a concatenation of practices that gets actualised by a non-calculable event that paradoxically calls for an active passivity, for actively awaiting that which could not be produced either by strategic guidance or subjective decisiveness, the tension between the idea of fragile, non-substantialisable politics as a momentary rupture and the idea of the necessity of giving this rupture continuity by instituting it. In positive terms, through the dismissal of the concept of a pure, once-and-for-all break implying a distancing from a certain tradition of messianic time, from the foundation of politics in an essence, a subjective potentiality or a primary contradiction radical politics become possible. The purpose of struggle is not the end of history or the transparency of freedom, because freedom is not a state that can be achieved but a mode of acting that it is yet to be produced. The political is a name for these strategic tensions. 3

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expression of the abstract form of capitalist domination to Beatrice Preciados afrmative concept of dildo politics as proto-communist queer act. My point of departure is the question of the problematic state of the thing and the relation between the dead and the living in Marxs theory of the fetish and Preciados deconstruction of fetishism. In the latter the use of dildos provides a privileged access to the beautiful experience of becoming a sensitive, inter-passive thing that exceeds the heterosexual dualism of activity and passivity, intellect and sensibility, the distribution into the one who fucks and the one who is fucked.
Becoming at least a thing

If one ignores the conventionality of an assumed post and the falseness of the temporal split into then and now that the use of post terms implies, postpornography could, in a strategic sense, stand for having and showing sex while insisting that it is not the real thing, the hidden truth or living energy of ones life. Postporn politics presuppose the knowledge that bodies have been educated and capacitated, through centuries of disciplining techniques, toward becoming a mobilised entity that is ready to work and in a tricky double movement of repression and production have been gendered and sexualised along a dualistic male-female, active-passive axis. Mistakenly, the modern subjects living in these bodies assume that their sexuality expresses a singular vital force that has to be freed from repression, releasing them from the realm of labour, rationality and repetition. In the eld of Marxism this sexual utopianism extends from Reichs orgasm theory to the entire Freudo-Marxist discourse, as well as to concepts of emancipatory sensuousness in Herbert Marcuse or Alfred Schmidt; it has also left traces in the feminist myths of amazons or matriarchal naturalness and in a sophisticated, non-naturalised variant still resonates in the queer over-afrmation of sex performances. At the end of the rst volume of The History of Sexuality Foucault wrote, And we have to dream that perhaps one day in another economy of bodies and pleasures nobody will really understand anymore how the ruses of sexuality, and of power which supports its dispositives, have succeeded in subjecting us to this austere monarchy of sex, to the point of devoting us to the indenite task of forcing its secret and extorting from this shadow the truest confession. The irony of this dispositive: it makes us believe that here lies our liberation. 4 At its best, Postpornography would be this non-utopian movement to another economy of bodies and pleasure, neither believing in sexual liberation nor in the existence of a constituent law that generates desire by introducing it to an unstable symbolic order, nor rejecting porn because of the existence of a straight or gay or emerging lesbian porn industry, which, especially in its straight version, produces an imagery of humiliation that draws on the historical enclosure, passivisation and hysterisation of women. In addition postporn politics reject the reduction of subcultural practices to the dimension in which normativity is simply subverted, as they insist on the non-measurable intensity of a practice whileremaining aware of its fragility and openness for recuperation. From this postpornographic perspective the body is desexualised and intensied at the same time. On the one hand, postporn detaches itself from practices centred around the reproductive organs and the primacy of the orgasm; on the other hand, it invents new ways of using various parts of the body for having sex. In her Contrasexual Manifesto Beatrice Preciado has analysed how S/M communities appropriated instruments that were invented and used during campaigns against childrens masturbation since the beginning of the 17th century. She proposes the decentring of the heterosexual system without giving queer sexuality a purely oppositional status. Her point of departure is the question of how S/M practices have made power-pleasure relations visible, played on them, reappropriated them and transferred them to contractual relations that are voluntary, momentary and potentially reversible. S/M shows how sexuality can become an unsocial act that decentres and desubjectivates the body. From this

point of view Preciado elaborates a queer and ironic version of what Bersani, in his reading of Genet, has called the gay outlaw. Preciados dildo techniques double Bersanis concept of homosexuality as an act of betrayal and desocialisation. The gay outlaw rejects the concept of a familiar triangularity in which the disruptive effect of a third agent guarantees the intimacy of a couple, allowing for the expression of a desire that will not be satised. Here, it is decisive that the idea of an ethical necessity of betrayal, which Bersani borrows from Genet, cannot be reduced to a merely transgressive relation to loyalty. The thing at stake is betrayal, not as a crime against socially dened good, but [] [as] a turning away from the entire theater of the good, that is, a kind of meta-transgressive dpassement of the eld of transgressive possibility itself. 5 The aspect that Bersani is particularly interested in is Genets dedication to the intensity of the unsocial, irrelative homo-ness of one man fucking the ass of another, blessing a sexual pleasure that repudiates intimacy and interrupts all conventionalities of the social: a luminous desubjectivation. While Genets and Bersanis version of the homosexual outlaw is heavily bound to gay exclusivity and the absence of women, Preciado invents a butch version of a universal outlaw practice that is in excess to heterosexual sociality. She shows how, in the space of homosexuality and S/M, the rst practices that deviate from heterosexual intimacy emerged by making contracts, using dildos, eroticising the ass. In a kind of magic seriousness, ranging from an explicit radicality to sometimes almost childlike simplicity, Preciado calls for the universal use of dildos in order to denaturalise sexuality, to infect it with a thing that is not a copy of a penis but an object that is both a way to appropriate the ass as the universal passive and non-reproductive organ that all people have and a way to multiply sexual acts, distributing them throughout the whole body. The Contrasexual Manifesto formulates several exercises for quoting a dildo: by rubbing a forearm, by rubbing a head whose mouth contains 75 ml of red coloured water ready to be spit, etc. The dildo thereby becomes a type of fetish that is no longer a substitute, which does not conceal the abject, which is not affected by a logic of lack, which instead introduces one to the intensities of becoming an interpassive, nameless thing that fucks and is fucked. In this way the dildo not only betrays distribution into living subjects and dead things; it also betrays the socially codied exchange relation between the one who desires and the one who is desired, therefore incorporating desire. In order to discuss the fetishs potential as a thing that embodies affects, passing through a subject and decentring it, I will turn to Marxs concept of the commodity fetish as real-imaginary expression of the impersonal and abstract type of domination in capitalism.
The spectre of the commodity form

As Derrida was kind enough to tell us, 6 Marx, in the rst chapter of Capital, wrote a spectral theory of the commodity-form as social relation, according to which the social appears to man as phantasmatic while it is actually a set of material relations between persons and social relations between things 7. Here we have an interesting form of real insanity which inhabits things without being at home in them. This insanity is not a natural feature of these things. It appears at the moment of exchange and expresses labours social character. A social form is embodied in the commodity value, which expresses a relation of substitution, abstraction and reication. Later Sohn-Rethel will call this real abstraction as actual as it is fantastic; for Marx it is a spectre that must be driven out. Thus, in the commodities value something that is otherwise untouchable can almost be touched: capitalisms mode of production. In this sense commodities are sensuously supersensible things, social crystals. This is their secret,

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which is shown by not showing, a mysterious mirror that prevents people from coming to grips with the mysticism of the commodity; it is seen as quite normal that things have a value and are exchanged. Marx reveals this as a mystery; he is a decipherer who shows that the phantasmatic will not vanish by being interpreted. It only dissipates once another mode of production is reached. In a passage in the rst chapter of Capital, which is, regarding the rationality of the revolution, as beautiful in its clarity as it is mystical, Marx points out that the whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production. 8 This lesson on spectres is held in the fourth section of the rst chapter of Capital, The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof. Conjuring up the magic of the commodity, Marx writes, using a vocabulary inected by the religious and fantastic, Here it is a denite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to nd an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. 9 Marxs pathos of truth is that of a critic of religion whose critique is still dominated by a religious spell that he aims to demystify he forgets to determine whether the distinction between a rationality of use and an irrationality of exchange is in itself spectral and idealist. In Vacillation of Ideology I, an essay on the problematic status of Marxs concept of ideology, Balibar has shown that the theory of value is an attempt to cope with a series of theoretical and practical difculties that Marx was forced to confront following the disastrous experiences of the failed class struggles of 1848-50 and his more detailed reading of political economy. 10 Marx had conceptualised the proletariat as a universal class whose productive formation immediately precedes the dissolution of all classes and primes the revolutionary process. This position presupposes a strict analogy between materialist being and praxis, whereby the proletariat becomes the real movement which abolishes the present state of things, 11 that is to say, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, 12 as he wrote in the introduction to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right. In this respect class stops being a formation that makes particular political demands and becomes a mass that is the practical negation of all ideology, immediately exceeding the existing order by unfurling its forces. After the defeats of the workers struggles in France in the mid 19th century, Marx realised how far his vision of the real movement of the proletariat was from what had actually happened. Furthermore, his study of political economy had forced him to see production as a process of separation and exchange that could not be integrated into the idea of a pure proletarian act. Hence Marx substituted the opposition of the reality of proletarian practice versus the illusion of bourgeois ideology for the concept of the real in the imaginary. He no longer opposed the contradictions in the categories of political economy to the revolutionary praxis of the proletariat, but to the praxis of capital and its advancing inner contradictions. 13
Contradiction and power relations

What is new in Marxs critique is that the commodity form displays the form of capitalist society itself, which is a form of a contradictory relation between abstraction and exchange. Marx starts from the elementary exchange of products so that x amount of commodity A is exchanged for y of commodity B; for example, 20 yards of linen are worth 1 coat. He does so in order to show that the social form does not hide in the money-form, but in the elementary value-form, in the exchange of one commodity for another. This form is determined by substitution and a double abstraction of use and of concrete labour. When linen is exchanged for a coat, the coat acts as a mirror of the linens value; its material purity vanishes together with its potential use. As soon as the commodity enters the market and is transformed

into the value-form, it becomes its own spectre. As a good disciple of Hegel, Marx claims that use value becomes the form of the appearance of its opposite. As this unit of the contradiction of matter-object and value-form, the commodity is abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties, 14 and becomes a bodiless body. In this sense Marx conceptualises the form of value as a contradictory law, immanent to the social relations of forces and expressive of their composition and dynamics. Thus contradiction wins the status of a para-individuality that has interiorised the different relation of forces: one abstract law of form that explains the social. In Pour Marx and Lire le capital, Althusser concentrates his entire methodological effort on giving the Marxian notion of contradiction the greatest possible complexity, which presupposes the rejection of the central logical position of value theory in the rst chapter of Capital. In contrast Althusser points out that capitalism, as a complex system of reproduction with relatively autonomous instances (whether political, juridical, cultural, or ideological), cannot be reduced to either the immediate production process or the sphere of exchange, nor can its structure be summarised by the difference between surplus value and wage or by the abstraction of concrete labour and use value in commodity exchange. By developing the concept of overdetermination, he shows that the Hegelian notion of contradiction no longer has a theoretical function in Marx. While Hegels idea of contradiction is dependent on the presupposition of a simple original unity which develops within itself by virtue of its negativity, and throughout its development only ever restores the original simplicity and unity in an ever more concrete totality, 15 Marx would turn to the idea of a complex set of contradictory relations structured by the dominance of economic contradictions over all others. In other words, the set of principal contradictions is not the essence, and the secondary ones are not its phenomena. Instead, they coexist and mutually condition each other, while the economic ones dominate the others. This idea of the primacy of principal contradictions (economics), which, in a process of translation and displacement, transfer their principality to the other contradictions of the social eld, guarantees the existence of a unity in Althussers thinking. Regulation theory replaced this concept of structured unity perceived as formal scholasticism with the idea that the contradictions themselves are unstable tensions in which a transformative subjectivity plays a strategic role, 16 while Foucault replaced it with the concept of an ensemble of different strategies of discipline, governmentality, valorisation, and practices that resist or evade their given order. From a poststructuralist point of view, the multitude of social relations does not conceal a law of contradiction that determines their limits. Contradiction is an exceptional form that the social relation of forces can assume. In this sense the materialism of an antagonistic relational form is replaced by the materialism of an irreducible variation of heterogeneous practices that discipline bodies, regulate populations, valorise labour. The historicity of one dominant contradiction is substituted by the idea of a contingent historical event conceived as an improbable effect of strategies of power that anticipate the dissidences evading them. 17 This reformulation of the connection between contradiction and social relations, which was carried out by the New Left of the 1960s, non-dogmatic Marxism and poststructuralist theory, allowed for a new thinking of the fetish.
Ghost things and enjoying dildos

For a deconstruction of fetishism and a consideration of the status of the dead thing, the spectacular element of Marxs comments on the character of the commodity lies in his strategy of shifting the form of the social into the form of the commodity in the moment of exchange,

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whereby the gure of a mysterious embodiment emerges, a real abstraction, a real within the imaginary. The secret is not hidden behind the object, it is in the object. This shift begs the question of the state of the thing. In a striking way, Marx makes the commodity autonomous, transforming it into a contradictory individuality about which he writes, [as] soon as [a trivial table] steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent [...] and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than table-turning ever was. 18 Ignoring the question of what will later be called biopolitics (i.e. the production of a subject that is ready to work, the regulation of populations, the reproduction of conditions that guarantee the expansion of chains of valorisation), Marx, in the rst chapter of Capital, gives the commodity a fetishistic force. To the both phantasmatic and real value-objectivity that commodities crystallise in order to allow for exchangeability, Marx opposes the material, actual, present objectivity of a simple thing in use. Of course this is phantasmatic in itself even if it points towards something irreplaceable, a jewel of social theory: capitalism is not a natural necessity. However, the theoretical side effect of Marxs concept of value is a critical ontology of presence as actual reality, which idealises the reality of things, the rationality of use and the self-transparency of production organised by a free association of workers that is to come. This idealism of the simple state of things characterises the romantic anti-capitalist mourning of things that have lost their original state and is echoed in the new social movements rejection of consumerism, the disgust for fake things and their abundance, the trumpery and glitter of the commodity world, etc. In Marxist aesthetic theory the female body became a privileged site for the metaphorising of the fetishistic force of dead things, demonstrating Marxisms analytical lack in relation to the constitution of bodies, sexuality and affects. Walter Benjamin is a master of this strange metier of the female embodiment of capitalism. For him fashion and prostitution show the living bodys coupling with the inorganic world, explaining its fetishistic sex appeal. For Benjamin the whore is in addition to the neur and the gambler the newly emergent type that expresses the human-becoming-commodity and the triumph of exchange over use value, of death over life, of things over bodies. 19 Perhaps, precisely against this line of argument, it is necessary to ask how it is possible to become at least a thing, not through a process of valorisation but through a dehumanisation and desubjectivation that opens subjectivity to an impersonal intensity. Deleuze and Guattari have called this opening thisness, a concept that even leaves behind the status of the thing and refers to the pure immanence of an impersonal life, a paradoxical duration in which personal individuality fades and becomes singular. 20 Critically referring to the status of the woman as metaphorical body of power, the anti-fetishist impulse of the structuralist, Marx-oriented and feminist movie tradition of the 60s and 70s led to a permanent gesture of deciphering and showing combined with a deep suspicion of the gaze and the superciality of the image. Instead of glamorous visualisations of women in advertising or mainstream movies, the complex set of social relations behind the simple image should be shown, the working conditions, the everyday situations and the difculties and troubles experienced by women; analytical and critical depth was set against supercial appearances. 21 Though psychoanalysis has heavily hindered any easy reading of the real by developing the concept of disavowal, which constitutes the unspeakable in the space of the unconscious, the analysis of fetishism becomes materialist and historical when it stops separating an imaginary eld from a eld of actual reality in order to allow the series of stratications that constitute the female body of consumption to be reconstructed. Erotic Welfare by Linda Singer, for example, examines how the ensemble of bodily strategies and consumer practices transfers a fetishistic effect onto the commodity that is simultaneously reinscribed in the body, producing affective dependency on consumerist activities. This systematics permanently displaces the boundaries between labour and non-labour, free time and pleasure, whereby the latter is assumed to be in excess of the former; while in fact it emerged and developed

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alongside labour, catalysing labours effectivity. 22 In this theoretical context Beatrice Preciado has analysed the paradoxical production of the female orgasm. The 17th century saw the beginning of a number of medical campaigns against masturbation, then considered a dangerous and abnormal exposure. These campaigns reached a peak in the 19th century when a vast number of instruments were invented to prevent the spread of the masturbation disease. These instruments, ranging from chastity belts, cock rings and bondage systems to electroshock apparatuses, marked the body with regions of pleasure and pain, isolating them in order to medically determine where sex is located. Through a play of repression and permission, these anti-masturbation devices show that sex lies in the genitals and that the orgasm is the corresponding bodily reaction. At the same time, medicine developed a method for treating female hysteria using genital massages to stimulate orgasm both as a symptom of and a cure for a hysterical t. For Preciado the female orgasm was produced at the intersection of these two reverse strategies of repression and production. This is why she suggests that the dildo is the truth of heterosexuality that will betray its logic because it is the bad copy of the penis that denaturalises the sexual eld and its dual distribution of positions. In its most strategic sense, the dildo disrupts the distinction between living subjects and dead things: The dildo is detachable and therefore resists the force with which the body reappropriates pleasure, as if pleasure were something that emerged from the body. The pleasure produced by the body belongs to it only to the extent that it is reappropriation. () The enjoying dildo knows that pleasure is never given or taken, that it is never there, that it is never real but always embodiment and reappropriation. For Preciado the dildo, as subversive quotation of the penis, reveals the inconsistency of the heterosexual regime. By a mere act of multiplication, it exceeds the sovereignty of the single signier and rejects the separations that the latter has instituted. It is what Derrida has called the dangerous supplement that destroys what it completes. Replacing the one with the multiple, this instrument demonstrates that the pleasure produced by sex can neither be attributed to a bodily region nor declared as subjective property: The dildo shows that the signier that generates sexual difference falls outside of its own game. The logic that it establishes is the logic that will betray it. 23 With this line of argument Preciado uncannily returns to the idea of a whole that is structured by one dominant relation that can be reversed into its point of inconsistency and, consequently, of collapse. Hence, with serious irony, she universalises one specic lesbian dildo practice as a protocommunist queer act; that is to say, she copies, in a surprising move, Marxs early idea of a universal class which is no longer a class, vanishing the very moment it actualises itself, and dissolves the order by a mere unfurling of its forces. The butch, Preciado writes, is not simply one sexual identity among others, or a simple declination of masculine codes within a female body, it is the last possible sexual identity. 24 This, however, resonates with the idea of the concrete universal 25, where the metapolitical idea of the class as non-class is substituted by an anomalous subject whose particular practice ceases to be a partial claim as soon as it questions the entire structure of a situation. This denition, in turn, logically re-attributes universality to one act (as momentary stand-in for universality) instead of showing how universality can only be the effect of a concatenation of acts that neither measure difference nor link difference with access to social rights and possibilities, acts that remain open for a militant diversication of their connections.

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Analysing the fading fashions of the 19th century, Walter Benjamin insisted on the pasts actuality in the present, the presence of what is not present. He refers to Marxs chapter, The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof, in which Marx presents the opposite position of the actuality of what is present, displacing the question that is posed there. Detecting another promising aspect of commodities that are not merely reduced to crystallised forms of privately expended, abstract labour, Benjamin does not want to exorcise the spectral and to return to elementary use, because he does not identify truth with rational production. Abolition of hunger and poverty, communality of production forces, just distribution, etc., are the preconditions for another society. However, as a revolutionary spiritualist Benjamin is searching for the promise of what a life could be in the tiniest details, brief moments of bliss, fragile beauty, the plaything of a child. Benjamin recognised in the commodity the sign of a standstill in what is happening. In the dernier cri of yesterday, in the most recent commodity crystal Benjamin nds the irredeemable of an epoch, its dark deception. He claimed that the surrealist, Andr Breton, was the rst to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the outmoded, in the rst iron constructions, the rst factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, the grand pianos, the dresses of ve years ago, fashionable restaurants, when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. 26 According to Benjamins messianic understanding of revolution as something sudden that happens now, like a shot at the clock tower, the possibility of something that has not yet been actualised trembles in the commodities glitter of distraction. Concerning our question of the magic thing or the thing-like thisness without a thing, what is to be done with Benjamins mixture of messianism, romanticism and materialism? Although it provides us with a way of perceiving the thing as the embodiment of a promise, his methodological gure of a dialectics at a standstill is too close to the idealist opposition between matter of use and form of exchange, where utopia and cynicism take up their respective positions, facing each other in the commodity. In his book Stanzas Giorgio Agamben criticises Marxs opposition of the enjoyment of use value as something natural and the accumulation of exchange values as something aberrant. In this way he takes the articiality of the commodity-thing, the will to fashion, the distinguished gesture of the dandy who is a connoisseur of the commodity world, as the starting point for another relation to things. He looks for a way to redeem things from the imperative of use, for the possibility of an impossible movement: the appropriation of unreality. But by neglecting the multiplicity of practices devoted to interpassivity and impersonal desubjectivated bliss, Agambens considerations remain deconstructive poetry. Agamben takes Baudelaire as an early witness of the struggle against utility, and the dandy Beau Brummell as a positive mode of becoming a living corpse, a thing and absolute commodity. By focussing his examination of how to become a thing on the aristocratic distinction between the last dandies and the coming world of salaried employees, he overlooks the blockages in their practices of coolness and beautiful emptiness, openness to impressions drawn from commodied things, that paradigmatically became visible in Baudelaires self-representations, which Benjamin partly revealed in his Baudelaire study: his pressure to subjectivate, his outdoing himself, his anti-bourgeois excess which establishes a negative relationship with what it transcends, the reduction of sex to a desire for transgression, and the de-socialisation and loneliness of his gesture of revolt. 27 The de-socialisation of Genets gesture differs from Baudelaires in two ways: rstly, in the production of blissful moments in which transgression consumes itself and secondly, through dissociation from that which is to be transcended, a move which Bersani has called a meta-transgressive dpassement.

Reconsidering the strategy of becoming a thing, the concept of thisness or haecceitas that Deleuze and Guattari developed in reference to the medieval conceptualisations of Duns Scotus offers an alternative that leaves the subject-object dualism behind. With this concept Deleuze and Guattari point beyond the paradoxical appropriation of unreality. They outline the possibility of an impersonal intensity in which pieces of things, parts of subjects, are connected with one another and are altered through a certain practice in a certain situation. This thisness is more individual than a subject or an object. That is what Deleuze alludes to when he quotes Lewis Carrolls grin without a cat. 28 In the conceptual manual at the end of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari dene thisness as the media of Becoming that happens on a virtual eld without substance and form, which consists only of the modes of individuation itself. 29 What is problematic here is the presupposition of a forceful inorganic life that constitutes this eld, an idea that though the force of this inorganic life is conceptualised as an effect of the connections it makes contains traces of a vitalist originality. In the ninth chapter of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari explain that the political takes place in a zone where these virtual movements encounter the structured solidications of the societal. Between the two exists an area of transduction , the micropolitical area where connections are established, severed and re-established. It is here that things are going to happen. 30 These concepts of thisness and nonsubjective micropolitics could be nice tools for a theory of postpornographic politics that deals with an economy of pleasure withdrawn from the axis of fucking subjects and fucked objects. To avoid being transformed into a denaturalised version of sexual liberation, a call for a mere combination of body parts, sex toys, drugs and hormones, or a metapolitical universal porn practice that is assumed to dissolve the heterosexual regime, postporn politics must become aware of the fact that politics is nothing but another name for militant connectionism.
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1 Cited as motto and thematic dedication on one of the rst pages of Golden Years. Materialien und Positionen zu queerer Subkultur und Avantgarde, ed. Diedrich Diederichsen et.al. (Graz: Edition Camera Austria, 2006). Originally from Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World & Films of Andy Warhol (New York: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1991). 2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. An Introduction (London, New York: The Penguin Press, 1990), p. 99. 3 For the corresponding idea of restricted political action, cf. Malgr Tout Collective, Manifesto [http://www.gtrlabs.org/node/106] 4 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality. An Introduction, p. 159. 15 5 Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 163. 6 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 7 Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, German Ideology in MECW, Vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 49. 8 Ibid., p. 129. 24 Ibid., p. 66 (translation by the author). 16 Cf. Alain Lipietz, From Althusserianism to Regulation Theory in The Althusserian Legacy, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, Michael Sprinker (London and New York: Verso, 1993). [http://lipietz.club.fr/MET/MET_AlthusserE.htm] 23 Beatrice Preciado, Kontrasexuelles Manifest (Berlin: b_books, 2003), p. 65 (translation by the author). 22 Cf. Linda Singer Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic (London, New York: Routledge, 1993). 30 Cf. ibid., pp. 229-255. Louis Althusser, For Marx (London; New York: Penguin Press, 1969), pp.197-198. 13 Cf. Etienne Balibar, Philosophy of Marx (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 54-56. 14 Karl Marx, Capital. Vol I, p. 120. 21 Cf. Laura Mulvey in the introduction to her book, Fetishism and Curiosity (London: British Film Institute, 1996). 29 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 558-559. 20 Cf. for this concept of an impersonal individuality Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (New York: Zone Books, 2001). 12 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, in MECW. Vol. 3, p. 182. 11 Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, German Ideology in MECW, Vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), p. 49. 19 Cf. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 490 - 515. 28 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), where he is referring to Alices Adventures in Wonderland: Well! Ive often seen a cat without a grin, thought Alice; but a grin without a cat! Its the most curious thing I ever saw in my life! 18 Karl Marx, Capital. Vol. I, p. 120. 27 Cf. Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire in Illuminations edited and introduced by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968). 10 Cf. Etienne Balibar, Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism I in Masses, Classes, Ideas (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 92-95. 9 Ibid., p. 123. 17 Cf. Etienne Balibar, Foucault and Marx in Michel Foucault. Philosopher, ed. Francois Ewald (Herfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), especially at the end of this article where Balibar compares Marxs and Foucaults understanding of the relation between contradiction and social relations, pp. 51 - 56. 26 Walter Benjamin, Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia in Reections (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), p. 181. 25 Cf. for a paradigmatic formulation of concrete universality see the Malgr Tout Collectives Manifesto.

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Conceiving itself in terms of a distinctive capacity for conceptualization, the human animal, at least since Descartes, has dened its relation to the world in terms of abstraction and separation, establishing its position of mastery through the value-laden, value-producing differentiation of contingency and essence. Genealogies of the human as traced by thinkers from Nietzsche to Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and, more recently, Giorgio Agamben, recur to this thinking of essence, this conceptual foundation of the human, to explore how the human, in Agambens phrase, rst constitutes itself through . . .exclusion (7). Such exclusions produce the metaphysics of the human and with it the metaphysics of humanism, generating, on the one hand, the distinction between zoe and bios that Agamben makes much of and, on the other, the Roman humanitas for which Greek civilization, as Arendt points out, possessed no comparable term. According to Arendt both the human and the humanities descend to us through Rome by way of the Roman invention of culture as a practice of care and preservation, one allied to the Roman sense of tradition, of devotion to the maintenance of a heritage, in this case a heritage taken from the Greeks, to whom the notion of culture was foreign. 1 The metaphysical exclusions by which were made human are thus, in their origins, conservative. And what they conserve is not simply the human identity they produce; its also the identity, as separation or abstraction, thats inseparable from conceptualization. The appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, Adorno remarks. But because, as he notes, the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived, the excluded part, the remainder, returns as antagonism to conceptual unity. 2 02 Hence Adorno aspires, in Negative Dialectics, to change the direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward non-identity, asserting that such an insight into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identication which the concept brings unless halted by such reection (12). This nonconceptual element, this determining locus of nonidentity, occasions the Cartesian search for freedom, where freedom signies mastery through abstraction from all that is doubtful, unreliable, inessential. And if the essence of the human as concept is found in the concept of essence itselfsuch that Heidegger can write, in what does the humanity of man consist? It lies in his essencethen the essentiality of the inessential, the constitutive character of the nonconceptual, the nonidentity internal to the metaphysical unity that humanism afrms, calls into question the human that it calls into being nonetheless. 3 In this nonidentity whose foundational exclusion is constitutive of essence, I propose that we nd the function, trace, and destiny of the queer, where queerness refuses the conceptual norms that attempt its discursive containment. Debarred as it is from essence, from the thought of identity and from

thought as identity, queerness occurs as the limit point that enables conceptual closure by materializing the unassimilability against which totality takes shape. Fluid, contextual, resistant to every attempted substantialization, queerness is situational but never positivized as an attribute, never xed, that is, as a stable term that results in a coherent perspective. Such perspective could only repeat the exclusionary logic of conceptualization from which, because always excluded, queerness would once again disappear. As permanent eruption of a nonrelation, of an unintelligibility, as the signier of social non-closure, the empty signier of that founding exclusion through which the social posits itself, queerness denotes the set of those things that stymie categorization, that impossible set of elements always external to any set, the paradox of particularity in the absence of specication. Queerness, to frame this differently, and to borrow the language of Alain Badiou, refers to the site of a truth event around and against which a given situation attains its dening shape. As a locus of radical particularity where universality ultimately encounters itself by way of its own negation and where value as such is lacking, at least from the perspective of the situation, queerness becomes an evental site by attesting to what that situation necessarily fails to count within it: what Peter Hallward valuably describes as the nothingness, the void, of the situation as it relates to beings multiplicity, to being as what can never be counted or conceptualized as a unity, an identity, a one. 4 Queerness, instead, obtrudes the structuring presence in each situation of an empty set, a void, an internal gap or excessive elementor better still, a gap that is itself the excessive elementthat multiplies identity and opens a radical non-identity whose manifestation is nothing less than an eruption of the Real. Such an inconceivable eruption, dissolving, for those who bear it witness, the situations apparent reality, permits no verication through logics given by the situation as such. Far from the realization of something latent but nonetheless possible within the terms of the situation, such an event is always impossible, even unthinkable within the concepts, the structuring reality, of the situation. But its truth is a universal truth, like the Real of the situations void or the pressure of nonidentity that nds expression in the drive. Hence the queer event proclaims the truth of a universal queerness that displaces the particular universal enshrined in the concept of the human. With this in mind I want to amend Samuel Webers important suggestion that The challenge to the Humanities . . . from this perspective, is to rethink the human in terms of iterability; which is to say, as an effect that is necessarily multiple, divided, and never reducible to a single, self-same essence (245). The challenge, instead, is to afrm, beyond the iterations of the human, the queer annunciation of something other than the human as aesthetic totality, to afrm what will have markedbut marked, we must dare to ask, for whom?the advent of the posthuman. The consequence of such a queer event, whenever it will have taken place, might be glimpsed, proleptically, in what I call here pornographic posthumanism: an unsublatable encounter with the universal solvent of identity, the drive that betrays the endless friction of a structural antagonism whose tension betrays the internal limit of social order as sucha limit whose manifestations appear as pornographic or obscene because incompatible with Symbolic mastery of the representational eld.
II.

I begin, therefore, with a simple assertion: pornography humbles intelligence. One might even say that the decisive event to which pornography contributes is nothing but such a humbling. Like queerness, pornography, of whatever stripe, denies the subjects intellectual, political, or

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sentimental self-totalization. As a genre insistently focused on parts, it exposes, along with the private parts, the parts of ourselves incompatible with the sovereignty of the whole and so with belief in the private self as the property of the subject. It exposes, moreover, epistemological mastery and the forms of its compulsory pursuit as the subjects self-constituting effort to sublimate something deeply offensive, even intolerable, to human dignity: the Real that erupts as the death drive at the core of Symbolic reality, evincing a machine-like automatism that mocks the subjects claim to agency and announces, instead, the insistence of something at odds with the regime of the human. But this otherness to the human that makes us human makes clear the ideological mystications that the discourse of the human intends. The effect of the anti-humanist position articulated by philosophers since Nietzsche, however, has not been to announce the achievement of some authentic condition dened as posthumanism, but to foreground the non-contingent bad faith of our relation to the idea of the human. We nd ourselves not posthuman but rather, I want to suggest, posthumanous. Like the God who survives the fact of his death by virtue of his ignorance, we, the posthumanous, linger on in the aftermath of the human, afrming, all the more passionately as its subject disappears, our outrage at threats to human rights, at crimes against humanity. The human, which was never more than an aesthetic construct to begin with, one useful in pushing the democratization that has morphed into neo-liberalism, functions as little more than the kitsch of aesthetic ideology, which, as described by Paul de Man, names a vulgarization of philosophy that denies it all critical rigor as thought and turns it, instead, into works of art appealing directly to the masses as natural expressions of their culturea culture adroitly consolidated in its illusion of organic 03 coherence precisely by such political manipulations of the aesthetic. 5 These totalizations of culture, which produce ethnicity, nation, race, and other categories of collective identication, both mirror and confound the totalization effected by the concept of the human, which locates our universal essence in the putative transcendence of contingent particularitya transcendence made possible precisely by the ability to conceptualize and generate universals. As a normative concept, the human, that is, depends on the logic of abstraction said to distinguish the human itself. But this logic allows no place for whatever obtrudes in its specicity, failing or refusing subsumption within this abstract universality. It has no place for the nonidentity that Adorno describes as the utopian particular buried underneath the universal (318); it has no place, in short, for the queer. This isnt to say that liberal democracies explicitly think queers as inhuman, though every day were reminded how close to the surface that current still runs. 6 But the queer as such, as the structural embodiment of resistance to normativity, as the stum-

bling block on which every conceptual identity always trips, never nds itself in the human. Estranged and excluded from the collectivization of parts into conceptual wholes, queerness establishes the limit-point that enables conceptual closure by materializing the unassimilability against which totalities take shape. But it also marks the internal disturbance that undermines any such closure. Distinct from those critical discourses that call on the latent deconstructive potential inherent in borders, parergons, or frames to assert the structuring centrality of a marginalized identity, queerness makes no bid for a place in the normalizing economy of the human. Wherever the concept of the human holds sway, the queer must emerge as its enemy. Not because queerness necessarily repudiates a universal essence, but rather because queerness materializes that essence precisely as conceptual antagonism, afrming a universal queerness that doesnt allow for totalization since it names the excess unaccounted for by conceptual identity. As the materialization of the unassimilable or, better, as the very concretion that is the unassimilable itself, queerness evinces the negativity, the internal contradiction or structuring antagonism, that simultaneously undermines and constitutes universality. Queerness, in other words, effects the universal desublimation of universality against which universality rst establishes itself. In order to approach this desublimation that is, as I argue, the common labor of pornography and the queer, let me pause at the outset on a passage from Hegel through which, unpromising as it might rst seem, we may gain insight into the impossible event to which queerness and pornography both speak: the event of dehumanization that, in the second part of this essay, I will broach in relation to barebacking porn that documents acts of sex between men who get off on exchanging the seminal uids theyve been taught, for more than two decades now, to avoid, as it were, like the plague. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel addresses the dialectic of the Spirits participation in the material world. He writes: when being as such, or thinghood, is predicated of Spirit, the true expression of this is that Spirit is, therefore, the same kind of being that a bone is. 7 Hegel proceeds to call this an innite or self-suspending judgment, one that achieves no resolution in stable and comprehensible terms, but persists instead in the mediating movement he denes as negativity (209). To lose sight of this negativity and to take as a xed proposition that Spirit is identical to the bone, afrming, in the process, that Spirit and bone each possesses a given meaning while each is also simultaneously determined by its identity with the other, betrays, Hegel tells us, the crudeness of what he refers to as picture-thinking. This, he warns, can lead to false or irrational understandings when the terms of a selfsuspending judgment are thought to be conceptually distinct, xed in what he refers to as the moment of this asunderness. This is the context within which he writes: The depth which Spirit brings forth from withinbut only as far as its picture-thinking consciousness where it lets it remainand the ignorance of this consciousness about what it really is saying, are the same conjunction of the high and the low which, in the living being, Nature naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulllment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination (210). The depth of Spirit thus abides for Hegel not with an ignorance, but in it. He afrms a conjunction of high and low not dependent on xed antitheses, a conjunction distinct from the logic of coupling by means of which heteronormativity responds to the impasse of sexual difference, the impossibility of sexual relation. He speaks, instead, to the difference between the fantasmatics of procreation, with its faith in the Spirits transcendent truth, and the recognition of Spirit in the matter that such fantasy scorns as waste. One need not identify Hegel

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as a queer theorist avant la lettre to see that his invocation of the dick, or the organ of generation, is a challenge to what Ive elsewhere described as reproductive futurism: the ideologization of the social order as the temporal unfolding of meaning in a syntax that requires the addition of the future as its always unrealized supplement. 8 Such a future, according to Ernesto LaClau, serves to naturalize as the horizon of political discourse an endless hegemonic contestation over which gure will manage, at a given moment, to embody for the social order the empty signier of universality. 9 But the future as the uncontested ground of such political contestation establishes the future itself as the structurally necessary formal supplement to every hegemonic assertion, a supplement that nds its privileged form in the gure of the Child. This appeal to the future as the assurance of meaning that sustains reproductive futurism would deny, therefore, that the sublimity of generation as Natures highest fulllment merely sublimates and euphemizes fucking when it celebrates procreation. The Child, who must otherwise function as the material evidence of fucking as such, emerges instead as its spiritualization, transcending fucking and negating it. But the dick, which Hegel perceives as the organ of generation and urination both, doesnt generate, properly speaking, at all: it comes, unleashing its seminal uid as readily as it would a stream of urine and scattering, whether to germinate or not, the cum that always contains something more than the co-called germ of life. Thats why Slavoj _i_ek glosses the passage from the Phenomenology as follows: Hegels point is not that, in contrast to the vulgar empiricist mind which sees only urination, the proper speculative attitude has to choose insemination. The paradox is that the direct choice of insemination is the infallible way of missing it: it is not possible to choose the 04 true meaning directly, one has to begin by making the wrong choice (of urination)the true speculative meaning emerges only through the repeated reading, as the after-effect (or by-product) of the rst, wrong reading. 10 In the analogy by which Hegel elaborates the conjunction of high and low, Spirit stands in relation to bone as generation does to pissing. The idealization of reproduction as the movement toward universal essence ignores the actualized universality of urination, excretion, waste. It ignores the non-identity, the negativity by which we are riven, made incoherent, particular, queer. But this very idealization produces the discourse on the human, a discourse that makes, in _i_eks phrase, the direct choice of insemination, by assigning to the register of spirit the humans abstract and universal truth. The queer, from such a perspective, by virtue of repudiating that direct choice, must be seen, therefore, as promoting, indeed as performing, dehumanizationthe very dehumanization for which pornography is similarly reviled. Like queerness, that is, pornography attends to the unassimilable remainder, the material excess that reects the negativity by whichand even as whichwe experience universality. Thus the minimal unit of pornography, lets call it here the porneme, would consist of an act of representation that reduces the es-

sence of the human, the spiritual quickening of the conceptual connection between conception and conceptualization, to the status of excremental matter, the murderous letter or literality of representation itselfa materiality that cannot, in consequence, be represented as such. Rather than object to moralizing assaults on pornographys dehumanizing tendencies, mightnt we insist on the truth event of a queer dehumanization? By appropriating, not without violence, Badious understanding of a truth event, I mean to claim that pornography, to the extent that its faithful to the porneme, to the anti-social transgression that properly motivates the genre, attests to what were always unable to cognize or to recognize: the end of the era of the human. The truth event, in its radical disruptiveness for those whom it makes its apostles, evacuates collective reality by means of an encounter with the void whose inclusion determines that reality while remaining unaccounted for within it. This Real is the structuring negativity or non-self-identity expressed in the death drive. Every afrmation of a truth event both evinces the negative force of that drive and also, in the process of afrming the event, of proclaiming its unthinkable identity, denies the drive as well. Pornography, as the inherent limit point of Symbolic representation, as the antisocial inscription of the death drive produced by symbolization itself, participates in the queer event, which is nothing less than the afrmation of a universal queerness exceeding and confounding the abstract and normalizing identity of the human. Testifying to the truth that would usher in a general dehumanization, however, has nothing to do with promoting what we might construe as the inhumane. How could it, when inhumanity is merely humanitys specular double, the image, not even inverted, of its narcissistic aggressions? 11 Such narcissism is categorical, attached, that is, to the categories of identitarian coherence. But dehumanization would abolish the human and the inhuman in one fell swoop by dismissing the normative coherence presumed by the logic of abstract identity. Like all conservative catchwords, though, the human enjoys the inestimable advantage of afrming what we think we know: the universal value of subjecting ourselves to the value of abstract universals, a value endangered by the solicitations of the local, the transient, the queer. Constantly proclaiming the imminence of this danger, the human survives by gorging itself on the pathos of its purported fragility. Any attempt to question it, let alone to deconstruct it, has the force of a deliberate assault upon its categorical integrity, eliciting, in turn, the pathos by which the human afrms itself. Paradoxically, then, the human becomes, in the process, almost invulnerable, drawing new strength as it does from the prospect of its possible dissolution. Thus its categorical undoing necessarily exceeds our grasp. And the posthumous survival of the human turns us, the posthumanous, into its specters, aesthetic ideologys afterimages, ghosts who endlessly haunt ourselves by clinging to the abstraction of coherent identity with a ruthless sentimentality. In the spirit, therefore, of Hegels analysis of Spirit as a bone, I propose here a parallel formula: the Spirit is the drive, where the drive performs the work of negativity expressed in the reanimation of the human by the queerness that also undoes it. The queer event, in other words, remains, like every authentic event, impossible at the very moment its actually taking place. And if, in Hegels formulation, the negativity of innite judgment demands a union of high and low like that by which Nature makes the organs of generation and urination coincide, then the truth event of the queer desublimates the conception of the human by identifying insemination itself with the matter of waste and death. The direct choice of insemination, therefore, to return to _i_eks phrase, may found our social logic by establishing the substitutive relations of exchange among meaning, reproduction, and cultural value, but the queering or devaluation that always attends afrmations of

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value disavows through projection the fatality of meanings meaningless material ground. Perhaps that can go some way toward explaining why Badiou, in Lacan and the Pre-Socratics, calls attention to a passage where Lacan refers to the aphorisms of Heraclitus: Among these aphorisms, Badiou declares, the most useful is the one which states the correlation of the Phallus and death, in the following, striking form: Hades and Dionysus are one and the same. 12 This is the dehumanizing truth that queerness, like pornography, embodies, a truth implicit in the English usage of spirit in the early modern period to designate not only to the transcendent immateriality of being, but also cum or ejaculate, as in the well-known words with which Shakespeares sonnet 129 begins: Th expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action. As the work of the contemporary pornographer, Paul Morris, may help us to understand, the queer event transvalues such waste by similarly locating spirit in the messy stuff of materiality and by refusing to deny or to sublimate the negativity inherent in the link between urination and generation, Hades and Dionysus, death and the phallus.
III.

So lets turn our gaze to the waste of shame and the prodigious expense of spirit in Paul Morriss pornographic workwork that will give us a better sense of how dehumanization operates and why I say we can embody or gure it but never succeed in achieving it. Morris, as the founder and moving force behind Treasure Island Media, has earned a signicant reputation by producing and directing barebacking porn that not only breaks the taboo on fucking without condoms in mainstream gay pornography, but also depicts, or, more properly, celebrates, the 05 anal absorption of seminal uids against which condoms defend. For Morris, a strikingly intelligent, aesthetically self-conscious, and politically sophisticated pornographer, depicting what looks like, or may even be, what our discursive regime has taught us to classify as unsafe sex reects not only his investment in the documentary impulse that subtends pornography, but also his Foucauldian resistance to the aesthetic conformity and sexual conservatism embedded in the representational politics of the mainstream studios producing gay porn. Porn depicts sexual practice, he writes, and a uniformity of sex in porn is indicative of submission of the subculture to larger power. The careful porn of the gay mainstream allows a strictly policed repertory of acts and styles that represents not who we are, but what we seem to believe we should be. . . . Danger, accident and specicity in porn insofar as they are honestly depicted (i.e., documentary) enhance the possibility of a more complex, demanding and therefore productive relationship with power. 13 Danger, accident and specicity: this triad denes the insistent particularity of the queer commitment to a jouissance unconstrained by the normalizing logic of abstraction that promises, instead, the safety and shelter of a humanizing universality. This does not mean that Morris simplisti-

cally endorses practices that result in the sero-conversion of HIV negative individuals, but it does mean that he recognizes pornographys function as a challenge to the totalization of the subject under the aegis of intellectual self-mastery. This logic, everywhere repeated throughout the general text of our culture, shapes the values relentlessly promulgated by aesthetic education, which is also to say, the values promulgated by education as such. Imprisoned by the principle of meaning-making in a pedagogical universe where everything colludes to further the normative project of becoming-human, were compelled, like the Duke in As You Like It, to nd tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,/ Sermons in stones and good in everything. What, indeed, is culture but acculturation to the universal value of meaning where meaning means abstracting valuea generalized, exchangeable valuefrom a queer particularity? Nor is porn, not even gay porn, exempt from the injunction to share in this cultural labor of normative humanization. The representational regime of safe sex, especially in gay male porn, has become, as Morris cannily notes, a sort of restraining caricature that serves what he calls the function of directed education as it undertakes to discipline what it claims to represent. True to the project of aesthetic education, where every appeal to affect must teach, where every sensory encounter must instruct, the gay porn denounced by Morris attempts a sanitization of sex by acceding to the normalizing imperative to congure sex as continuous with safety . Like aesthetic education in general, such porn proves anesthetic. It images a universe whose so-called safety comes at the expense of the expense of spirit, a universe purged of sexual liveness, to borrow a concept from Lauren Berlant, purged of the disruptions of jouissance, and purged, therefore, of queerness as Ive been characterizing it here. 14 Queerness remains, in Morriss work, the unsublatable remainder of every transcendent spiritualization. And he condenses that queerness in the particular stuff that futurism sublimates: the cum, the ejaculate thats idealized within a heterogenerative framework as human essence, as spirit, as vitalizing seed. If the logic of reproductive futurism conceptualizes cum as the cause of conception, bestowing upon it a meaning derived from its place in a narrative sequence that exchanges what it is for what, under certain conditions, it enables, Morris directs our attention instead to its status as material substance, as the viscous uid jetting from all the cocks onscreen that provides the documentary evidence that we are watching the thing itself. That invocation of the thing itself, though, leads us back to Hegel and to the negativity involved in the designation of Spirit as a thing. In Morriss case, the simultaneous depiction of cum as thing or substance and as sign or index of the thing itself marks a version of the split between bone and Spirit, between particularity and universality, that his work resolves through its afrmation of a materialized universala universal materialized in the particularity that marks every subjects access to the experience of the jouisssance that Lacan, in Seminar 20, explicitly describes as enjoying substance . . . the substance of the body, on the condition that it is dened only as that which enjoys itself. 15 Not transcending the viscous uid, nor afrming its sublimation, but nding, paradoxically, within it the index of pure materialization, Morriss pornography immerses itself in celebrations of contact with cum as a gure of the enjoying substance that makes jouissance the substance of the body. Cum for him is the condensate of the subject in the Real, not as it might be for others, what Lacan refers to as agalma, the fantasmatic treasure that denes a secret, internal essence, a precious, unique, and compelling attribute that generates desire. To the contrary, cum attains its privilege for Morris as the messy excrescence of a jouissance whose very particularity effects the subjects universalization, reducing the subject as ego, as conscious agent, as imaginary self,

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Breeding Season, Breeding Mike ONeill, Plantin Seed, and Knocked Upthe gures of in-

semination are stripped of spiritualizing promise and refer instead to an absorption of cum that occasions an access to vitality only insofar as it overcomes the constraints of what we call safety and opens onto the jouissance of an encounter with the Real that ne06 gates whatever we think we are and whatever we think we know. Referring to the originary moment of life, to the moment of human conception, these titles discover within that moment the germ that utterly undoes itthe germ, that is, of the impossibility inherent in the sexual relation. Breeding the jouissance of the drive instead of the Child that would signify life, the inseminations of Morriss tapes mock the privilege of human conception by calling into question the universal value of the human as a concept. That concept itself is determined by the structuring fantasy of the phallus, the fantasy through which the phallus as necessary supplement to the material body provides the template for the sovereignty and coherence of the subject, who is thereby at once allowed and compelled to enter the order of meaning. Enshrouded in the veil of fantasy that alone enables it to function, the phallus stands as the gure for the solidication of the ego that nds its long-term guarantee in reproductive futurism. Thats why Lacan can remark with regard to this fantasmatic phallus that: by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital ow as it is transmitted in generation. 16 But throughout his career Lacan attempts a disruption of that fantasy by insisting on viewing the phallus itself as the rupture, the difference, the

This segment begins with a prologue that features a montage of images traversing the screen in a series of visual overlays. In each case the camera directs our attention to an act of ejaculation, largely focused on the hands and the cock of the man who is shooting his load. But the spirit expended in this waste of shame will not itself go to waste. Whether shot into a glass container directly or spat into one after having been ejaculated into someones mouth, the cum is gathered and preserved as attentively as the sperm in Moby Dick. Numbers periodically cross the screen, though not in chronological order, reducing the ejaculations of these free-oating cocks to so many loads of cum. Shown onscreen in black and white as the background on which the sexual climaxes appear, by contrast, in color, a hand slowly pours the ejaculate into

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to nothing but the largely indifferent, if necessary, adjunct to its production. Our status as embodiments of this substancefor which cum is one particular, and particularly masculinized, cultural gure, but by no means the only onemakes the subject universally queer, by which I mean radically particular in relation to the Real of jouissance. But such a particularization afrms no identity, neither personal nor sexual identity, nor does it speak to the queerness of a subject position, nor to the queerness of a given subject. It marks, instead, the queerness that effectively undoes the subject itself through an encounter with what exceeds the identity we acquire through subjectivization. This queerness, therefore, must not be confused with pleasure, liberation, or desire. Beyond the eld of such categories, because beyond the eld of the human itself, queerness pertains instead to the drive that refutes our fantasies of sovereignty and survival, confounding, in the process, the idealizing illusion of epistemological mastery. Like pornography, queerness occupies the space of what resists the advances of knowledge, what conceptualization cant domesticate by way of its will-to-identity. As such it never coincides with itself, never quickens into form. In Morriss work, the cum that is and that gures the thing itself preserves its signifying link to heteronormative procreation, but his tapes subject that association to the rigors of an innite judgment. Though his titles will frequently borrow the traditional language of reproductionconsider, for example, Breed Me,

division that disaggregates the identity it models. We can see that division enacted as Lacan, paradoxically, posits turgidity as the image of the vital ow, or more precisely, as the image of the vital ow as it is transmitted in generation. Heteronormative ideology congeals the emulsion of this vital ow, with its uidity, mobility, and mess, in the turgidity as which it conceives the phallus and also, by extension, itself. In the rigid dick the vital ow succumbs to rigor mortis, to a sort of mortication, to the solidity of what Deleuze evokes as the wall of representation or the statue of the father, which immures the material ow he describes as a formless, nonhuman life. 17 By documenting sexual encounters that defy the protocols for depicting anal sex in mainstream gay male porn, Morris attempts to reverse this norm of phallic, erotic, social, and nally political mortication. 18 His porn tapes replace the value of the dick encased in its phallic armor with the value of pure expenditure, with the quantication of cum, and with the heroic stupidity of the anus hungry to receive, to absorb, to secrete it. Dont misunderstand what I mean by this epithet, heroic stupidity. It has nothing to do with a condemnation of unprotected anal sex and everything to do with acknowledging the drive, characteristic of pornography, beyond epistemological mastery, beyond intellectual comprehension, beyond reason, sociality, identity, and so beyond the human too. The asshole, as the locus of cultural taboo, as the place made to signify nothing but waste and the absence of value or meaning, displaces the phallus, in Morriss work, as the privileged site of pornography. And that privilege derives from its exemplary relation to nullity and inexpressivity. Removed from everything socially productive, it gures the absence of personhood, the hollow core, the structuring emptiness, that demands, in heteronormative culture, sublation into the human, demands the positivization of its zero into the one of phallic identity. For Morris, though, this void has the force of the oracle at Delphi. But where the latter presented its wisdom beneath the inscription, Know Thyself, the asshole initiates, in Morriss work, a radical unknowing of selfhood. As the site of evacuation, involuntarity, and penetrability, it localizes the evacuation or dethroning of the social subject itself. Like the rocking waves of Walt Whitmans sea that whisper the single word, death, the lips of the asshole in Morriss tapes speak the death of the human that conceives itself on the model of phallic form. Perhaps thats why the cock in his porn is reduced to mere instrumentality, subordinated to the vital ow of the cum that it conveys. In essence the cock becomes essence itself, its value, the waste of spirit, where waste or expense is prized as a good and sexual hunger consists in the will to consume this waste as value, as the union of Hades and Dionysus, as the material dissolution of the phalluss claim to abstract universality. And nothing conveys this more clearly than the sequence, for many no doubt unappetizing, from the chapter of Morriss Breeding Season (Treasure Island Media, 2006) called Making the Devils Dick.

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the mouth of an open condom, taking care to preserve each drop of the precious uid thus gathered.
Image 01 03 Page 8

The prologue ends with the men and their cocks evicted from the screen, leaving us, instead, with the swollen condom lled with 73 loads of cum. Image 4 Page 8 After a brief fade to black we see the condom again, shown in color and swaying back and forth until Morris, using a lter of red, superimposes upon it a shot of this cum, frozen and removed from the condom now, congealed in a solid mass. The camera, tracking back, then shows us this object being held in the hands of naked man who smears it all over his cock and chest for his sexual partner to lap up before using whats left in solid form to fuck the other mans ass. Image 05 09 Page 8 The montage of ejaculations in the prologue, then, serves merely to frame a depiction of the making and unveiling of the Devils Dicka dick that isnt a dick at all, but that literalizes phallic hardening as the freezing or congealing into object-form of Deleuzes formless, nonhuman life. The opening kaleidoscope of images privileges cum, not the dick thats coming. Reduced to an ancillary feature in a series that doesnt defer to chronology and could, theoretically, go on forever, the dick here loses its standing as general stand-in for the phallus. Over and against the integrity of the phallus, over and against the unity of the subject supplied by the concept of the human, Morris adduces the loads of cum we see milked from anonymous donors and combined to produce, 07 in the Devils Dick, the phallus under negation. Formed by the freezing of cum in the phallic mold that a condom provides, the Devils Dick unpacks the connection between the phallus and the condom itself. It reads the condom as a metaphor for the operation of the Lacanian veil through which the phallus performs its role. The condoms association with safety, therefore, is in one sense purely formal: it defends the rigid identity of the phallus with the abstraction of identity itself. As prservatif the condom preserves the mastery of the human subject, warding off the messy exchanges of sex and the encounter with the bodily substance of jouissance and its trace at once. Removed from the freezer, unwrapped from its condom, unveiled in its status as object, the Devils Dick immediately starts to melt once again into cum. In doing so it effectively allegorizes the dissolution of form, including the form imposed upon the subject as itself. Where the condom preserves the integrity of form, the porneme here denies it, which accounts for the mordant irony with which Morris pointedly infuses this sequence: the condom appears in this barebacking tape only as the template for a dick of pure cum to ll the bottoms ass. However much this may tempt us, in response, to

read breeding in the title of Morris tape as a trope for sero-conversion or impregnation with HIV, the emphasis, quite to the contrary, falls on the liveness that sex as such can breed: not life in the future, not life in the Child, but life in the grip of the drive itself, the liveness of uncongealing, of melting from meaning as if into matter, of escaping the mortication of a condomized and frozen imitation of life. The hunger for cum throughout Morriss work is the hunger for such aliveness, for such a radically materialized essence, where life is not the refusal of death, but aliveness to the constant implication of death in and as ourselves. As the site of an innite judgment where presence and absence, sign and substance, life and death are held in suspension, cum, for Morris, to venture a deliberately provocative formulation, positivizes negativity, risking, as does Morris himself, the multiple meanings that phrase might have in the context of bareback sex. Materializing a drive-like refusal of life thats no more than resistance to death, bareback sex in Morriss work attempts to approach the Real, the impossibility, informing sex as such. His reference to breeding thus ironizes the reproductive imperative whose alibi translates cum into seed, fucking into trying to get pregnant. Against these sublimations, Morris camera insistently returns to assholes and mouths that are avid for cum, heroically receptive, endlessly absorptive, drinking it in like intoxicating spirit, but a spirit that springs from material connections to piss and shit and sweat, to the surplus bespeaking the subject itself as desublimated ideality, as an originary desublimation, as the desublimation that posits the generative sublime only retroactively. But porn here encounters a limit. Serving as it does to document something in excess of representation, the remainder that constitutes its inevitable surplus, it can seem to represent that surplus, and so to appeal to the conceptual logic that the porneme seeks to undo. No sooner does cum start to signify the Real thats inherently excluded from meaning than it starts to allegorize the Real instead, effectively turning, like culture itself, a prot of meaning on waste. It thus returns to the innite judgment by means of which Spirit and bone are conjoined much like pissing and reproduction. As sign and index of the thing itself, cum remains in the orbit of fantasy, obedient to the desire that would tame the drive by fantasizing an object. The queer event toward which porn points remains, therefore, impossible; our very will to escape the human insistently reinscribes it, keeping the pure porn moment at bay even as its arriving, as if the encounter with porn meant no more than the endlessness of postponementthe very postponement and dependency on a temporal supplement of the still to come by which reproductive futurism attempts to balance its books. Maintained in such a suspension, like virus or sperm in seminal uid, we, the posthumanous, trapped in the thought of the human whose time has passed, live for the moment of the queer event when something like life could occur. For the event as such is a queer event in its drive-like annulling of the framework that secures our identity within the Symbolic. The Child may embody the compulsory sublimation that is reproductive futurism, but its mewling and puking covertly acknowledge what cannot be sublimed, as if, in its very spittle and drool, the Child symptomatically sought to cough up Hegels bone in Spirits throat. True to the queer event that throws out the baby for its gural bathwater, or at any rate for the piss and cum that designate a zone of vitality always in excess of any Child, Morriss work risks everything on the risk of encountering life, a risk that exchanges the phallussovereign, veiled, and perpetually turgidfor the sloppy semi-fredo of what he calls the devils dick. Hades and Dionysus are one and the same, claims the Heraclitean aphorism that Lacan describes as referring to the correlation of the Phallus and death. But the death that the Phallus installs is itself the sublimation enforced by the Child. And the life that the devils

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dick signies is that of Dionysian abandon. The event, however, as queer event requires a particular abandonment: the abandonment of whatever is for something unknown and foreclosed from being, the abandonment of what we think we are for the Real that remains unthinkable. As the mad Ophelia tells Claudius after Hamlet has killed her father, We know what we are, but know not what we may become. More precisely: we think we know what we are, but that knowledge denies the drive within that pursues our unbecoming. Thats closer to the truth of the queer event evoked in Morriss porn, which gures these various abandonments by literalizing yet one more: the abandonment of the condoms protective veil, the prophylactic container that freezes the human in phallic form. Such abandonment marks the abandoning, the melting away of our being human, as if, by thus dissolving, we might, like the devils dick, be cum and so, in consequence, unbecome the beings we think we know.

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Textes 4
1 See Hannah Arendt, The Crisis in Culture, in Between Past and Future (New York :Penguin, 2006), esp. section II., pp. 208-222. 2 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 194), p. 5. Subsequent page references to this edition will be indicated in parentheses in the text. 3 Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, cited in Jacques Derrida, The Margins of Philosophy, ed. and trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 129. 4 Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 65. 5 Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 16 Jacques Lacan, The Signication of the Phallus, in Ecrits: A Selection, 6 Item: In an article on the website gay.it, Ewan McGregor is quoted as having responded as follows to questions about his performance as a gay man in Edward Blums lm Scenes of a Sexual Nature: Non sono mai stato soldato ma ho recitato la parte di un soldato ha detto McGregor, Il mio personaggio, Billy, un essere umano. Che sia gay o etero non fa alcuna differenza. Admirably liberal as that statement may be, the need to make it at all suggests that many might nd it to be untrue. Cinema: Ewan McGregor in coppia gay, it.news.yahoo.com/11082006/135/ 9 See Ernesto LaClau, Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000), pp. 44-89. 8 See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). is one of dismal death and corpsere, of men killing and men killed, of vile things and vile destiny, shows that, like other epic wellsprings, such as the Old Testament, most of which postdates Homer, it is more knowing in its awareness of humanitys most distinguishing trait inhumanity than literature of later ages. On Bariccos Homer, New York Times Book Review, August 6, 2006. 18 Morris videos evoke, whether or not they actually depict, what is known as unsafe sex. A central topos is the depiction of the top either coming in the bottoms ass or coming on it before 17 Giles Deleuze, Bartleby; or, The Formula, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 77. 09 trans. Bruce Fink (New York :Norton, 2002), p. 277. Press, 1996), p. 154. 7 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 208. All subsequent page references to this edition will be indicated in parentheses in the text. 11 Nick Tosches helps to shed light on this point, though without any theoretical self-consciousness, when he writes the following sentence about Homers epic in a review of Alessandro Bariccos An Iliad: That this fountainhead of Western literature begins, exquisitely, with the word wrath, just as the poem itself 14 For the concept of sexual liveness see Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 15 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore 197273; On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 23. 13 Paul Morris, No Limits: Necessary Danger in Male Porn, 1998, http:// www.treasureislandmedia.com/morris/x-stream.htm. All subsequent quotations from Morriss writings refer to this text. cinema-ewan-mcgregor-in-coppia-gay. html, August 11, 2006. 10 Slavoj _i_ek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), p. 33. 12 Alain Badiou, Lacan and the Pre-Socratics, in Lacan: The Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj _i_ek (New York: Verson, 206), p. 13.

Post Porn Politics

reentering the anus to inject his cum within. Though this violates the practice of mainstream gay porn, where concerns over HIV transmission have established as a normative protocol that depictions of anal sex the presence of a condom, one should not assume that Morriss actors are engaging in unsafe sex. That, of course, would depend on the HIV-status of the actors in relation to each other. My argument, however, is that by conating unprotected sex with what registers as unsafe sex in dominant industry practice, Morris porn intends to suggest that unsafeness is endemic to sex that exceeds merely phallic jouissance. And that unsafeness, for which the queer was excoriated even before the epidemic of HIV disease, expresses the non-identical and the non-cognizable within us all, the stupidity of the drive that will not be deterred by the ruses of desire. I am grateful to David Halperin for his generous and incisive suggestions that helped me to strengthen and clarify this aspect of my argument, but he bears no responsibility for the many ways in which its argument, and it psychoanalytic inection, clearly differ from his own.

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6 Textes

Textes 6 I. Online Sex Chat: A Post-Human Cure?

Post Porn Politics

A conversation unfolds in a disembodied space where nocturnal explorations and seductions crash into the rigid value systems and testing methods of the behaviorial sex sciences. Show-n-tell is a euphoric chatter who easily grabs your attention. Madame Remedy brags about innovative technological tools to measure sexual arousal and dysfunctions. Show-n-tell has a supersonic engagement with ephemeral data and modes of sensuality that can hardly be measured by Madame Remedy. The goal of dialogue between Show-n-tell and Madame Remedy is to playfully reexamine the climate of overexposure to sexual data in digital media networks. First of all, it pays tribute to Sylvere Lotringers account and critique of behavorial sex sciences. In Overexposure: Perverting Perversions Lotringer explains that sex scientists search for sex zones and perversions as a mechanic checks an engine, they merely search for the mental dysfunction, hoping to remove it painlessly, with the appropriate tools. (204) Lotringer works out of a tradition of radical critique of psychoanalysis and wants to propose a Nietzschean post-humanism, as he detects in science an unending pulse towards quantication and aestheticization of sickness. Lotringers study is also a cynical recognition of the undergrowth of our condition of the unending party as he raises the question if too much partying and wallowing in sexual data is leading us to cultural death. Lotringer observes how, in the lab of Dr. Seymour Sachs, Penile Plethysmography (an instrument strapped around the penis to measure erection) is used on male sex offenders to quantify and modify their positive reactions to awkward or socially unacceptable desires. He explains in detail that Sachs is not a moralistic person but a pragmatic and cost-effective therapist who tries to locate and cure the patients exact arousal/deviation zone. For instance, one fetishist tells Sachs that he is turned on by the sight of female sandals, but Sachs repetitive physio-assessment shows that he is actually climaxing on toes and feet. Sachs discards the tale of the sandal and tries to narrow down and dene the patients exact deviation from the norm. These kinds of methods can be called a post-human cure in that they go beyond a patients self-reported knowledge of sexual identity and uctuating desires. It doesnt matter whether a patient has some type of sophisticated knowledge about sex, what matters is how to accurately measure and modulate his/her patterns of excitement. One of the treatments described in detail by Sachs is that of overexposing or satiating patients by telling stories of their exact and empirically tested perversions with such frequency that they lose erection or interest and are able to move on. The repetitive enactment of the perversions rst leads to a quick erection, but then the patient reaches a state of lethargy: New sexual therapy turns boredom inside out into a weapon to extinguish every desire. (19) The behavioral therapist tries to replace this emptiness with stories of healthy sexual communication and domesticated desires that may slowly revive the patient. However, the post-humanist philosopher closes the book and argues that we have become entirely dissolved in processes of communication while they announce a perennial exhaustion or perhaps a disappearance of the sex drive. So what happens when people are constantly using pornography-aided seduction methods on each other? Are we fed up with it or adequately nurtured through acts of mutual sharing? There are of course many novel pleasures that emanate from online chat, even if they are problematic categories for the encyclopedia of sex scientists. These acts of innovation have been criminalized throughout history precisely because they introduce sexual energy in the face of a cultural nihilism that runs through the sex sciences. But the thrust of scientic fanaticism is appealing too, as Lotringer has pointed out. A constant exposure to sex

as ephemeral data could it be leading us towards loss of desire or more rened articulations of arousal?
II. Show-n-tell and Madame Remedy Show-n-tell:

Madame Remedy, I just started going to chat rooms. I fell in love with the energy. Most of the people there are in the adult rooms. Image 01 Page 8 Its full of live video, chat and sex. I nd the space so compelling, the variety of images that are broadcast and the way people communicate both in words and picture.
Image 02 05 Page 8 Soft Arousal Latex Party: Web Arousal and Porno Exhaustion Katrien Jacobs and Chantal Zakari

At rst I decided to show only the top of my head. I want to hide my identity in case someone would recognize me. Hiding part of my face feels comforting, but in a funny way it makes me look younger and more exotic. It also emphasizes that I am there to watch.
Image 06 Page 8

I watch naked men waiting in front of their computers. I watch their naked bodies juxtaposed with the keyboard, the screen and all the cables. Like a tourist in a foreign land, I make screen shots of my desktop. I capture images of people, naked, sometimes headless, watching the screen, waiting for something to happen. Image 07 Page 8 Like a street photographer I move in this new kind of space, and I document all that I see. Unlike a street photographer, I often nd myself in ofce spaces, living rooms and even bedrooms. The street and the home have blended together. But you know, my curiosity is irresistible. I want to see how virtual sex works. I have a vague idea that it is about mutual masturbation; and even though I am pretty sure I wont go all the way, I still want to see how men react once a woman goes beyond simply irting.
Image 08 Page 8

I own two skirts and choose to wear the shorter one. I walk into a room. My camera is pointed at my thighs. I am wearing black stockings, I am fully dressed. No esh showing, I start caressing my thighs. Image 09 Page 8 I say nothing. I watch men sending me messages, getting undressed and masturbating. My moves are repetitive, almost boring. I perform slowly because I know the connection is not good today and I want to make sure that I produce a moving image. I keep caressing myself with one hand and moving the mouse around with the other hand, clicking, opening video windows, copying chat text, grabbing images to document this event. I am very busy. In my little notebook I write the names of the men who reach orgasm. The longer I caress my legs, the longer the list gets. This is the most exciting and bizarre thing I have ever done!
Image 10 Page 8

Men who reach orgasm leave the room, opening space for new men to come in. There are so many horny men all waiting to get into the room. What I do feels like social service. Most men thank me after they ejaculate. Image 11, 12 Page 8 Ejaculation looks really impressive on video. Under the right lighting conditions, it shines. I really like watching these ejaculations happen right on my own monitor, in my own studio. No mess for me. People that I have never met, that I will probably never meet, perform their most private acts in response to my image of touch. Image 13 Page 8

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Textes 6 Madame Remedy: Madame Remedy:

Post Porn Politics

Thank you very much, Show-n-Tell. It has been a while since I have received such a compelling case to think about and respond to. I am not sure if you are aware of this, but I received a grant to do research at the Clinical Division of the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory at Hong Kong Tribute University. I was invited to clinically test the physical and mental responses people have to pornographic images. I was so pleased when I arrived there to check out the facilities and nd out what kind of equipment they are using, as this branch of the behavorial sciences is often ignored by us theoreticians and scholars of digital media. So before I comment on your experiences in the adult chatrooms, I would like to give you some background information about our lab. For decades sexologists trained in the behavioral sciences have tried to measure arousal as phychophysiological responses to images using advanced technological methods, either by recording changing brainwave responses or by asking subjects to write down reactions in different kind of surveys, such as the Sexual Opinion Survey (SOS), the Video Reaction Questionnaire(VRQ) and the Sexual Fantasy Questionnaire(SFQ). These experiments are carried out in labs that simulate an intimate home environment and expose subjects to various types of pornography in order to test responses. For instance, the womens division of our lab was started in the late 1980s. Researchers in this division conduct applied clinical research on womens sexual arousal in order to develop a better understanding of the effects of various pharmacological, biological, and cultural variables on sexual functioning, behavior and attitudes. This research utilizes in-depth interviews, self-report questionnaires and the vaginal photoplethysmograph to assess womens subjective and physiological arousal. Given the highly sensitive nature of this research, condentiality and an atmosphere of respect are critical. Each of the female researchers has undergone extensive training in research protocols with female sexuality. Additionally, our instruments undergo a thorough disinfection between uses and are completely safe.
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Rumor has it that Stephanie plays pre-recorded videos, and, in fact, is not really a woman. Some men get angry and feel cheated after they discover that the images that excited them were not live video. It makes me wonder whether it matters if Stephanie is a woman or not. After all, isnt the woman who originally posed for the video real? And the image is all we have.
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Taking about images that arouse us, I have an example that might interest you. My best friend in virtual space is Stephanie. When we are in a room together we acknowledge each other. We respect each others interest for guys, we mock ght over the same guy, we embarrass rude guys and we often compliment each other. There is no competition, as the room is big enough for the two of us. Stephanie is any mans virtual fantasy. She types fast and has a great sense of humor. She is bilingual and can accommodate both a French and an English speaking audience. She claims to be a sexually liberated young French woman living in NY. She chats with guys for hours, gets them excited, promises to show herself nude and delivers! Her video window usually shows her ngers typing on the keyboard. This makes all the men in the room ask to see her body. She doesnt immediately expose herself. Its her chat that keeps them interested for a long time. Her writing is expressive and dramatic.

Let me point you to the study from 2004, A Sex Difference in the Specicity of Sexual Arousal, in which researchers have posited a rigorous sex difference, showing that sex arousal is category-specic in men. This means that women are more responsive to a variety of seductions and porn genres and even identify with varied sexual orientations and sexual tastes, but men have more limited responses to shifting categories and data. But how do scientists come up with concrete evidence about arousal? Male genital arousal is assessed with the penile photoplethysmograph (PPG), using a mercury-in-rubber strain gauge to measure changes in the circumference of the penis as erection develops. A stretchable band with mercury in it is tted around the subjects penis. The band is connected to a machine with a video screen and data recorder. Any changes in penis size, even those not felt by the subject, are recorded while the subject views sexually suggestive or pornographic pictures, slides or movies or listens to audio tapes with descriptions of sex scenes. Computer software is used to develop graphs showing the degree of arousal to each stimulus. The machine costs about $8,000 and was actually rst developed in Czechoslovakia to prevent draft dodgers from claiming they were gay just to avoid military duty. I couldnt get Hong Kong Tribute Universitys labs permission to make a picture of our PPG, but it resembles the 1020 EC model currently used for a variety of other medical tests. We do make the subjects feel as comfortable as possible as we measure those subtle changes in the blood ow. 1020 EC Plethysmograph model Image 23 Page 8 In the 2004 study males were tested with penile plethysmography, while females and male-to-female transsexuals were assessed with vaginal photoplethysmography, which measures vaginal pulse amplitude (VPA). In addition, subjective arousal or lack of arousal was assessed continuously through self-reporting by using a lever that moves through a 180 degree arc. The vaginal photoplethysmograph (VPG) is a small, tampon-shaped device which is selfinserted into the vagina and measures Vaginal Blood Volume, Vaginal Pulse Amplitude, and heart rate in response to an erotic stimulus. The vaginal photoplethysmograph is completely safe and is sterilized in Cydex-activated glutaraldehyde. This sterilizing procedure is commonly used with hospital instruments and is known to prevent both viral and bacterial transmission of infection. Vaginal Photoplethysmography Image 24, 25 Page 8
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The other day I met a French guy. He calls himself FrankSud and is into online SM. He tells me that online sex is easy. The real trick is virtual SM its very cerebral, he says. I told him I would try, so he emailed me a shopping list, not a very long one, but quite a lot of things I dont usually have at home, like handcuffs, a whip, candles, various leather clothes, high heel shoes you get the picture? Anyway, next time I saw him I told him I didnt like the list. The handcuffs and the whip were a bit intimidating. He tells me a whip can hurt, but it can also caress. I dont know, I think these objects are too symbolic. I trashed my high heel shoes, because they were not comfortable. I like the idea of the leather bustier. But candles? Hot wax dripping on my skin? Thats painful! Apparently I am missing the point.

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Then I ask him what he would be wearing: it sounded like we were spending too much time discussing my outt. He tells me, Nothing special. He will be wearing his regular, everyday shirt. Thats not fair, I said. Why isnt he wearing something a bit more special, too? He politely reminds me that SM is never about equality. I think he was amused. Finally, maybe because he is giving up on me, he tells me I can wear anything I want as long as I dont show it on camera. He explains that virtual SM is a game, a game of trust. For example, if I was wearing a bustier right now, and I told him so, he doesnt even have to see it. Only seeing my bare shoulders would complete the illusion for him. You see, its all about mutual trust. You cant cheat, he tells me ... Image 26, 27 Page 8
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VPG and PPG are also frequently used by sex therapists in the USA to accurately diagnose, evaluate and treat sexual disorders and deviant behaviors. For instance, when sex offenders refuse to admit that they enjoy sex with minors, the PPG/VPG are used to measure psycho-physiological reactions that can lead to confessions. The studies we are concerned with here try to measure and quantify various categories of deviancy. The 2003 study, EEG Responses to Visual Erotic Stimuli in Men with Normal and Paraphilic Interests was keen on measuring different arousal levels in different types of males. The study used EEG or Electroencephalography to capture neurophysiologic measurements of the electrical activity of the brain. These measurements were recorded from electrodes placed on the scalp and/or on the cortex. As the researchers write, the rst EEG study was carried by Lifshitz in 1966, who measured the effects on males of artistic depictions of nude women, compared with pictures of ulcerated legs. Simulation of images used in EEG study by Lifshitz in 1966
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The subjects in the 2003 EEG study were sixty-two white right-handed heterosexual males who were divided into two categories: normal subjects and paraphilic subjects. Paraphilic subjects were dened as those interested in scenes of transvestism, fetishism and sadomasochism and were found in special interest clubs and through announcements in niche magazines. The study worked with EEG analysis because it was based on the hypothesis that normal and paraphilic subjects get stimuli from different hemispheres of the brain. Though the right hemisphere initiates emotionality, aggression and sexual arousal, it does so under regulatory control of the left hemisphere, which includes sexual triggers in the format of verbal cues, rituals and scenarios. The researchers believed that left hemisphere activity could indicate an underlying deviation from normal arousal pattern activity and wanted to test the presence of paraphilic tendencies in subjects. The right-handed males were asked to ll out a SFQ (Sexual Fantasy Questionnaire) and were then seated in a comfortable chair. They were wired with 1 cm diameter electrodes on their scalp and around their right eye to measure the EEG responses. They were exposed to slides (projected with a Kodak Carousel) that showed a mixture of 57 heteronormative slides, 57 paraphilic slides, and 57 neutral slides (for instance landscapes and street scenes). Simulation of images of 2003 EEG paraphilia study Image 32 34 Page 8

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For some, group action nights are whats arousing. For example, last night I was in Jadeds Utopia. Everone participated, but the grand show was Tom and Jaded.
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I fade into the background and become part of the group. Images of our esh are transmitted digitally through all the electronic accessories we own. Our keyboards become an extension of our tongues. Eyes of strangers have been extended over the internet through a series of wire connections all the way into my studio. Now everything on my table relates to the body. When I move my webcam around, its as if I am moving their eyes. Our bodies dont stop at the three dimensional anymore; they have expanded and now reside in virtual space.
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III. References Show-n-tell, webaffairs, with an essay by Allucquere Rosanne Stone (Eighteen Publications: Boston, MA) 2005. Katrien Jacobs, Libi_doc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art (Ljubljana: Maska) 2005. Katrien Jacobs, Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics (CO: Rowman and Littleeld) 2007. Sylvere Lotringer, Overexposed. Perverting Perversions (LA: Semiotexte) 2007. Originally published in 1998. Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else, From Discipline to Performance. (New York: Routledge) 2001. Mark Dery, Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere: The Sublime and Grotesque in Web Porn, Keynote Lecture delivered at Art and Politics of Netporn, Amsterdam, October, 2005. Abbreviated version of the lecture available on Derys webiste [http://www.markdery.com]. Erick Janssen, Deanna Carpenter and Cynthia A. Graham, Selecting Films for Sex Research: Gender Differences in Erotic Film Preference, Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 32. No.3. (June 2003): 243-251. Rogeria Waismann, Peter B.C. Fenwick, Glenn. D. Wilson, Terry D. Hewett, John Lumsden et al., EEG responses to Visual Erotic Stimuli in Men with Normal and Paraphilic Interests, Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol 32, no.2, (April 2003): 135-144 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman And the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Penguin Books) 1979. Chantal Zakari is an artist who was trained as a graphic designer. She has been designing hyper narratives for the Web practically since its inception in the early 90s. I.D. was published on the web in 1994. She also collaborated on a web journal, The Turk and The Jew, with her husband, Mike Mandel, while he lived in Pullman, Washington, and she in Chicago, Illinois. In 1998 they published the work as an artists book. In 2001 under the pseudonym Show-ntell she began a 4-year performance and documentation of a webcam community where people meet to have virtual sex. Her book, webAffairs, a photo/text narrative that she designed and authored, was published in 2005. Zakari is a full time faculty member at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where she chairs the Text & Image Arts area. She has received many grants and fellowships, including a LEF grant, City of Chicago grant, an Independent Publisher Book Award and a MacDowel fellowship. Her work is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art Library, Getty Research Institute Library, Kinsey Institute Library and many artists books collections. She has had solo shows in the U.S. and Europe. Katrien Jacobs is a scholar, curator and artist in the eld of new media and sexuality and works as assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong. She was born in Belgium and received her Ph.D. in comparative literature and media from the University of Maryland with a thesis on dismemberment myths and rituals in 1960s/1970s body art and performance media. She has organized netporn conferences in recent years with the Institute of Network Cultures [http:://www.networkcultures. com]. She published Libi_doc: Journeys in the Performance of Sex Art. (2005, Maska Publications). Her new book, Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics, (Lanham: Rowmand and Littleeld, 2007), analyzes porn on the Internet. Her work can be found on [http://www.katrienjacobs.com].

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Interviews 6 stream lesbian for that matter. We post porn modernists are exotic unconventional creatures. EMS A lot of my work was in conversation with feminism, with feminisms inability to accept sexuality as viable for pornogracation. It wasnt really porn that I was interested in but these dialogues, debates, and concepts. TS One dialogue you had with The Dinner Party (1974-1979), a classic feminist work by Judy Chicago. EMS Yes, Judy Chicagos piece was about inviting all these mythic women to a dinner party. I wanted to do another kind of dinner party and invite some more radical kinds of women. So my piece, Dinner for Two (1997), is both a homage to and a critique of Judy Chicagos classic. I invited people that Judy would never invite, like Lucille Ball, a comedian who was blacklisted from Hollywood movies during the McCarthy era. She had married a Cuban man, and this led to her not having access to the Hollywood starlet system. I invited Valerie Solanas who wrote the Scum Manifesto, Emma Goldman, the radical anarchist and Lizzie Bordon. Whereas Judy Chicago worked with abstract owery genitalia aesthetics, I made some straight up cunt shots with biographical text scrolling over them. So if you look under the glass on the table you can see these big bushy cunts on TV monitors, representing my guests. There are two chairs visitors can sit down on at the table. The chair seats have vibrators embedded in them. So while you look at these pussies on the video monitors you are being vibrated. Its a very hot piece. TS One major difference in the major discussion between classic feminist art and something like this work lies, I think, in dealing differently with fetishism. I think your work No Regrets, Imelda (1997) is also very fetishistic. EMS Yes, its largely about foot fetishes and a shoeworship piece. There is a pedestal with two bronze high heels standing on it. You will also nd two peepholes in the pedestal itself. Behind the peepholes there are monitors with various images of high heels and girls in high heels, like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. If you move towards the heels on the pedestal, they tap really loud, in a constant rhythm. Its metal on metal. In the lm you see also contradictory images, one of yourself walking towards the piece, and on the other are clips from somebody getting off on neon heels worn by strippers. TS Since 2005 the two of you collaborate on a multi-faceted processual work called the Love Art Laboratory. The project is supposed to run for seven years, which means that now, 2009 is your fth year already. Its partially inspired by the work of the highly respected performance artist and life-ist, Linda M. Montano. AMS Yes, Linda was my performance art/life mentor. Her piece 14 Years of Living Art was something I was very connected to and enjoyed immensely. Right when Beth and I fell in love, the US war in Afghanistan was raging. There was so much violence. Our natural inclination was to do art that would generate love, and we decided thats what we would do. Then a couple weeks later Linda put out a call for artists that would like to use her seven-year structure, with each year based on the theme and color of a chakra. We decided to take her up on her invitation. About ten other artists are using her structure too. Its a great experience. We made a commitment to do art exploring love for seven years. That includes sex too, of course. Each year would have a different theme and color. So for instance, 2008 was our green year, which was connected to the heart, and compassion. We decided to make it about ecology and taking the Earth as our lover. So we came out as ecosexuals. We married the Earth. Were having a menage a tois. Our work may be about love, but its sexy too. At least I think its sexy. Love is the new sex! Our new theatre piece we are working on now is called Dirty Sexecology.

Tim Stttgen We are sitting around the kitchen table in London. You, Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens, are in town doing your theatre piece, Exposed; Experiments in Love, Sex, Death and Art. Youve invited artist Cosey Fanni Tutti, whom you have long admired but never met, for brunch and she will arrive shortly. Thanks for including me today. Annie M. Sprinkle Our pleasure, Timi. As they say in high school these days youre the balls! Thats a big compliment. Yeah, were super excited to meet Cosey Fanni Tutti. Ive always wanted to meet her. She was a huge inspiration in my life and work. TS Elizabeth, the story goes that you were always fascinated by pinup models and porn stars. Your work The Porn Star Academic Bronzed Panty Collection (2004) is addressing that. In this work, you take the actual worn panties of porn stars and of academics and cast them in bronze. You say in an artist statement that porn stars and academics are heroes for you, compelling, powerful and sexy. And both are fetishised in their worlds. In what situation did you become interested in porn stars an interest that also made you admire Annie? And were you into polysexual relationships as you started becoming an artist? Elizabeth M. Stephens I grew up in West Virginia. My dad had a machine shop and there were these pinup calendars on the walls that were advertising tools. When I would visit my dad, I liked to look at the exotic ladies who held the tools. But the guys who worked for my dad always tried to block my view, so I kind of knew I shouldnt be looking at the pictures. But that peaked my interest in pinups and sex symbols all the more. Later on, my Boston years (1980-1990) were great. We were a bunch of what you would now call queer friends. We had lots of sex together. It was mostly women, but we would also sleep with men if we liked them. I left Boston to go to graduate school at Rutgers University where Martha Rosler was a professor. The school had a huge feminist politic and aesthetic. I was interested in playing with that and kind of turning it on its head. I was interested in porn stars when I was in school, and they were kind of anti-porn-star. So my later work, the Bronzed Panty Collection, is an insider joke on feminism. I actually really do love feminist work. I met Annie in 1991 when I curated her tit prints into an art show at Rutgers University. I went to her apartment in Manhattan to pick up the prints and I liked her right away. There was a spark between us. But she wasnt a lesbian at the time, and I had a girlfriend. So we became casual friends and stayed in touch for many years. Eventually she became interested in women, and when she found out I was single she called me for a date. (2002) We fell in love during our rst kiss. I started meeting her friends in the sex industry and I really liked them. I thought they were really hot. Annie met my academic friends and thought they were hot too. Our friends mixed really well with each other. AMS Being with Beth for seven years now has been an incredible experience. I had no idea that a long term committed relationship could be so exciting! Its so radically traditional. Luckily Beth had a positive take on sex workers. She also has this wonderful quality of not caring what people think about her. Lots of people would be intimidated or turned off by a woman who has had sex with thousands of people. Beth wasnt intimidated by my reputation at all. I was more intimidated by my own reputation than she was. Beth is a true post porn modernist at heart. Shes a conceptual artist. She understands that being with a post porn modernist is quite different than being with a mainstream porn star, or main-

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Interviews 6 EMS If post porn really has a political dimension it should include any age, race and gender. Today you can see porn imagery of every kind of body on the Internet. But does that mean that racial or sexual hierarchies just diminish? Of course I have an anti-censorship position, and I am totally supportive of groups representing themselves in the Internet. But sometimes representation itself should be the point for critique in post porn again. I remember a performance piece we did called Sex in a Bag (San Francisco, 2003). It was at some performance space where a whole bunch of artists were performing, and all were sex-radical-artist types. Hardcore sex performance art is still pretty radical in most parts of the world, but sometimes in San Francisco it can become redundant. So we felt like we were having radical sex because we were hidden inside the bag. I like turning presumptions on their head. AMS I adore San Francisco, and I am deeply connected to its sex community. I call San Francisco the clitoris of the USA. Some of the performances were great, like the Porn Clown Posse, where about ten clowns were running around in a circle with their latex gloved ngers up each others butts. It was outrageous and fun. But sometimes these performance events end up being like a competition in sports. How wild can everyone be? So we decided to be more mysterious and challenge the context a bit. We made this big silver bag, put it in the middle of the room and got inside it. Then we took off our clothes and had sex for about an hour inside the bag. Then we got dressed and came out of the bag. People could tell we were having sex in the bag, and the bag was moving around and we were making sex sounds. But no one could see the details. A lot of people found it puzzling, which was great. A good post porn experiment. Experimenting is the name of the game for me. Learning and teaching too. TS Are longer durations sexier for you? And stuff which is not so hardcore as well? The French theorist Flix Guattari coined the term soft technologies, which I thought of as you started doing workshops and performances about cuddling and kissing. AMS Beth and I just held a four-hour Extreme Kiss workshop here in London. About 50 people came some came as couples, and others paired up. First we prepped the group, stating our intentions, then we all went onto the street and sat in chairs facing a partner and started a two-hour kiss. Kissing is actually in some ways a taboo. For example, prostitutes and porn stars often dont kiss while working. Or a person might have sex with someone but not kiss them because it would seem too intimate. EMS Well, our kisses proved to be very taboo, because a whole gang of mothers from the neighbourhood came with their kids and their husbands who were carrying baseball bats and they told us to get off the street. Because we are lovers instead of ghters, we went inside the lobby of the Chelsea Theatre and continued the kissing there. Maybe it was because some of the partners kissing were same gender. It just became part of the piece. We all got really high from kissing two hours straightthe hard part is not going further than the kiss. Then we stopped and decompressed and shared our experiences. So I guess I am into slow soft-technologies. (Laughs) AMS I denitely am. We have done three-hour kisses at gallery openings. But dont get me wrong; hard-core sex still has its place in performance and media, of course. And I have nothing against quickies. EMS We were invited to perform at the Museum Kunst Palast in Dsseldorfthis huge world-class museum. We did a naked one-hour kiss in a gallery of etchings by the masters: Picasso, Klempt, Beuys It was very elegant. Then we did a one-hour naked spooning piece in the lobby as people left the museum.

EMS Weve also done a series of very sexy public walking tours for lovers. We did some duration kiss pieces, cuddling as performance art, the Chemotherapy Fashion show, tons of lectures and workshops. We did a sance where we invoked the spirit of Marcel Duchamp and made love with his spirit along with about 100 French art lovers. Fluxus artist Willem DeRidder was our medium. That was very Post Porn! AMS We are very busy bees spreading pollen all over the place. EMS One of the bigger projects we do is a series of weddings, working with various communities in various countries. The day before we were going to get legally married in San Francisco, the Supreme Court said we couldnt. That pissed us off. So we decided to have a wedding every year. Of course we are not uncritical about marriage and exclusive relationships, but we want to have the same civil rights as heterosexuals. Weve done ve weddings so far and have two coming up this summer. Theyre site-specic. We always tell people no material gifts, but we welcome collaboration on the creation of the weddings. Last summer for our green wedding we had 150 people collaborate on making the wedding and four hundred people attended. It was open to the public and free. In the middle of a spectacular redwood grove, we made vows to the Earth. A few months later, we did another green wedding in Zagreb, Croatia, with about 50 collaborators and 200 people bought a ticket to come watch the wedding. As far as anyone could ascertain, it was the rst queer wedding in the entire Balkans. There was only one little death threat directed at our producer. Its amazing that projects about love can become controversial. In Stavanger, Norway we did one of our Free Sidewalk Sex Clinic events where we simply set up tables and chairs and give the public free advice. We were protested by a group of anti-porn feminists because we were doing it near a porn shop, and then a neo-Nazi in a black ski mask spray painted a blood red Jewish star and the word JUDE on the window. It was kind of scary. AMS I am proud of my polysexually perverse herstory, and Beth has one too, but whats next? Change happens. Love Art Lab is on a great trajectory right now. Our work is full of humor and fun, and we love it. But doing work about sex was easy compared to doing work that addresses love. Love is much more challenging. People think the topic of love is New Age or Hallmark-y. But then they come to one of our wedding performances, and they feel so good, like they just had really sweet sex. Love feels delicious. TS I remember how puzzled some people in the audience at the PPP-symposium were when they heard the title of your presentation Post Porn Love! But talking to experienced sex workers and post porn artists like Bubu de la Madeleine and Virginie Despentes made clear to me that reproduction, intimacy and relationship might be something rare and important after all these years of multiple sexual partners and total sexual exposure. AMS Yes, right. Age probably has something to do with it, but its not just age. Its wanting to go to the next step, to explore new territory. Wild, promiscuous sexual adventures are fun for two or three decades but then it gets somewhat predictable. It becomes the norm, and even boring. I wanted something else at a certain point. I was a little embarrassed to become so exclusive, but I love it. However, we are what I call adventurous monogamists, because we have a lot of erotic adventures with other people in various ways. I like to buy Beth lap dances at strip clubs, I set up erotic massages with our husband Joseph Kramer, and next week Im surprising her with a bondassage session with a dominatrix friend

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Interviews 6 AMS Id say that the door closed on feminism in general. When I speak at colleges, I see that most young college students will not call themselves feminists even though they want the same things feminists want politically and socially. They also think that sex is not a feminist issue! Rape is. Birth control is. But not sex. Sort of the same old argument, but in a different frame. In my book Post Porn Modernist I had a chapter called Post Porn Politics. It was about the activism I did from 1975 to 1990 with my sex worker friends around sex work and what came to be called sex positive feminism. Sex positive feminism was a term that was created in response to the anti-porn feminists. It didnt exist before that. Post Porn Brunch TS Its funny; when I did the symposium I didnt know that the term Post Porn Politics already existed in your work. What I wanted to do was to reactualize the interface between representation and sexual activism again in relation to queer politics, which rely strongly on questioning sexual representation. The work of Beatriz Preciado and Del La grace Volcano inuenced me a lot. AMS Timi, I was thrilled when I heard you were doing a conference called Post Porn Politics. Its so great to see people like Virginie Despentes, Beatriz Preciado, Del La Grace Volcano, Bubu De La Madeleine, Girls Who Like Porno, Madison Young and others take up the term. What I loved about the symposium in Berlin was that it connected the old with the new and wove together several generations. It was a fantastic conference, and I loved every minute. TS You wrote at the end of your book Post Porn Modernist, I have a vision for the future where all the necessary sex education will be available for everyone; there will be no more need for abortion, no more sexually transmitted diseases. No one will ever go hungry for sex because there will be sex kitchens all over town serving sex instead of soup. Sex is a powerful healing tool, which will be applied regularly in hospitals and psychiatric clinics. We will learn how to use orgasm to prevent and cure disease as some of the ancient Tantrics and Taoists did. Sex workers will be highly respected for the important work they do, and desire will be decriminalized. Men will be able to have multiple orgasms without ejaculating so they can maintain erections for as long as they want. Women will know how to ejaculate. No one will care what gender people have sex with. In the future, everybody will be sexually satised, and there will be an end to violence, rape and war. Do you think these lines inuenced Beatriz Preciados Contrasexual Manifesto? AMS Unfortunately, I havent read it yet. But I adore Beatriz, the way she thinks and the things she is doing. Its so nice to be acknowledged by her. Beatriz just connected us to a curator at the Venice Biennale, so well be doing our Blue Wedding to the Sea there. Were having an artgasm, were so excited. Maybe sex positivity is pass now. The eighteen to twenty-ve-year-old women are either working in the porn industry, or they arent interested in porn at all. They grow up with porn on their computers, and its just an irritant. Whereas before the 1970s, women virtually werent allowed to see porn, so of course we really wanted to see it. We pro-porn feminists have done our jobs so well that for many young women today, seeing or watching porn is a non-issue. When I started making porn in 1973, my cohorts and I were risking jail time. EMS Hey, the doorbell is ringing. Thats Cosey Fanni Tutti! AMS Cosey, thank you so much for coming today. I am so happy to meet you. Youve been a huge inuence on me. Ive followed your work for years. There are some things I still dont know about you. Like how and why did you start working in the sex industry?

AMS It was an interesting experience to be so minimal. And so chubby, and so naked. TS Annie, how did you feel about performing, at the symposium, your Public Cervix Announcement piece where you show your audience your cervix with a speculum and a ash light. Is it something you are tired of doing? AMS I had retired the piece for about twelve years. But it was really fun to do it again. In Berlin at your conference it was about showing it to a new generation. Also, I updated the Public Cervix Announcement by having Beth put the speculum inI used to put it in myselfand then by taking my wig off at the end of it. Revealing my cervix, then revealing my naked bald head. I had just nished chemotherapy for breast cancer. So that was interesting. I held a microphone between my legs so people could comment on what they saw. Its fun to show ones cervix with several hundreds, like at the Volksbhne theatre where your conference was, which was, like, 800 seats! Such a huge theatre for such a tiny cervix. But then, the cervix is the doorway to life as we know it, and a great mystery. Your Post Porn conference in Berlin was wonderful. I was thrilled that you took the Post Porn theme up. TS Both your old and your new work made clear to me that for you sex is a vehicle for both political change and also for questioning and reworking narrations of your identity. AMS True. Its also something I just enjoy doingits amusing. And its good for ones health. You should know that the term Porn Modernism was originally created by Dutch artist Wink van Kempen for a photography show he was having. His title resonated with me, so I asked if I could rework it for the title of my rst one-woman show. I named my show Post Porn Modernist. Later I started calling the porn I was producing and directing Post Porn, intending to describe porn that wasnt mainstream porn; it was more political, experimental, feminist, humorous, conceptual and not necessarily focused on being erotic. In the 70s and 80s I just really wanted to turn people on. But then around 1988 I stopped caring if people got hot and just did whatever the hell I wanted. I should add that I owe a lot to Fluxus artist Willem De Ridder, who was my boyfriend in my mid twenties. Once we were making tit prints and I said to him, this cant possibly be art, because its so silly. And he said, thats why art is so great. He encouraged me to experiment with art and porn. TS Would you say that pro-sex-feminism or sex-positive-feminism was also an intervention into a certain intellectualism of academic feminism? I am asking this only because its history in many academic contexts I see today is merely forgotten, or at least not represented. Do you think there was a time when people closed the door again on sex-positive feminists? EMS The door was never really that open, I have to say. Of course there were people like Gayle Rubin, Pat Calia and the group Samois, and sex-educators like Betty Dodson, Carol Queen, and Susie Bright. And feminist sex workers, who were all friends of Annie, like Veronica Hart, Nina Hartley and Scarlot Harlot. Some people were able to move into more institutional areas, which might have been a response to the Reagan era of the eighties. But it was only for a short time that these people would really be accepted in the mainstream, if they ever were.

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Interviews 6 of expression, at best both for the audience and the performers themselves. A lot of the things we did then, even if they seem more common now, would not be possible in the artscene. Besides some guys who make tons of money for provocation or in doing sexist art from a male artists point of view, I have the impression the climate in most art contexts became very stiff and rigid again. I remember when we performed anal sex live during an art performance with an object made out of wood with 6 metal spikes all round it and dildos on each end. We could use it for every hole of the body and many participants. So it was anal and vaginal sex in a way you dont see it in contemporary porn or contemporary art now. It was very ritualistic and tribal, both in a dark and an auratic way, which had nothing to do with typical ways of arousing the viewer. It seemed more like an initiation ceremony. I have to say, in an age of provocations for art sales, that all this was very natural for us in a way, that it came out of progressions our movements and former performances would have. We didnt force anything. The only thing we asked ourselves sometimes was this: which taboos do we have, and in which way can we work through them in our performances? Another thing of course was saying fuck you to the contemporary art scene, both in form and content. We hated the gallerystructure, and we wanted to make clear that these practices come from somewhere else than art schools. It was a work against a system of degrees and stars. TS A highlight in this working phase of yours was the Prostitution show at the I.C.A. in London. I have the impression that this brought a lot of the ideas together that you were working on for years and pushed it to its highest point. CFT Yes. The show was already a kind of goodbye to the artscene. It was like a living archive, including a walking Tampax stick and all these sleazy mags with porn images of us that we would produce ourselves, including a lot of S/M imagery, which we did for our own pleasure. Everyday we would bring more things. We also invited a stripper, who seemed somehow less enthusiastic than even parts of the press about the show. 1976 was an interesting phase, a phase where it became clear that music would become our next thing and not just another Cuom project. Thats how Throbbing Gristle started and put a symbolic end to Cuom. But yeah, Prostitution brought a lot of things together. Billy Idol was there, and there was Suzy and the Banshees, Malcolm McLaren, press people, nude models, famous artists and hipsters. It was a bit our perverse version of Warhols factory. But it was also a really explosive cocktail. Genesis got his nger broken in a ght over being accused of exploiting me. The director at the time, Ted Little, was kicked so badly that he had to be taken to hospital. There was a seven-foot black drag queen called Java who was the bouncer that night. Then there was a scare that someone had slit their wrists in the mens toilets. This little old man in a uniform came running in causing havoc. The only thing that had happened was that Gen had thrown the fake blood hed been using during the TG performance down the toilet. The whole evening was like that. Total chaos on every level. Thats how Throbbing Gristle got famous and Cuom became history. TS How do you see the relation of porn and exploitation today? Some people say its all exploitation, and some say that sex workers have much more agency than people think. CFT I felt very liberated in what I did and hated people trying to make me into a victim. But I also have to say that there were quite a lot of assholes in the business. At the end, like always, it has to do with who is in power of the means of production. It was great to see that people like Annie Sprinkle and Veronica Hart in the U.S. became erotic lm directors themselves. Even people who now have the image of being famous and radical artists, like Eric Kroll or Richard Kern, would abuse their models, shoot them as they were on heroin or plainly fuck them.

TS Did people already call it performance art at that point in time? No. There was no classication for it. TS And how did sexuality and nudity become a part of Cuom? I remember rst that Cuoms work was very strange and absurd, like Fluxus or Duchamp. Yes. Our rst work, as it became more performative, was really into anti-meaning and destroying the value of art. We hated the art-scene! As I became a nude-model, my experiences became a theme in our work too. We wanted to push our boundaries and work out our inhibitions. Performing nude was one way to do that, and bodies are beautiful objects

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TS Did you take part in the legendary performance collective Cuom Transmissions since the beginning, also marking the start of your lifelong collaboration with Genesis P. Orridge? No. At the beginning Cuom was very sound-centred and was about acoustic improvisations. I would do props and costumes but not perform with them. Then Cuom became more abstract and performative. We developed abstract scenarios and environments to give the whole project a much deeper dimension and joy. We would have different textures and lights in every situation, but less stylish and posh than it is done today. People had to crawl through a polythene tunnel to get into the concert space, and these kinds of things. We were very much into disgusting and crude things, which was great, as long as people would respond productively. But somehow, this changed one day and it got destructive. It was at this point that we became interested in more experimental theatre or performance practices, things which at least involved a bit of distance from the audience.

Post Porn Brunch

Cosey Fanni Tutti By accident, as often happens when women seem to be good objects for the male gaze (laughs). When I moved to London I lived in this strange area at the Whitechapel Road, which was basically Jack The Ripper territory. The Kray-brothers, who were twins and leaders in organised crime in the London of the 60s and 70s, hung out in the Blind Beggar pub, which was just on the corner of this camera shop where I worked. There was a room above the shop where people could take pictures of a model which was me! AMS So did you do it out of curiosity and adventure, or did you need or just want the cash? CFT All of this. I was told I would get used for posing and I could become a model. The usual bullshit (laughs). Sometimes it was boring or even disgusting, but I was happy to get more jobs and pose at photography clubs. Of course, I wouldnt meet great artist photographers at these clubs. They tted more to the sad-but-true clichs of sweaty men and train spotters. But I think it was good to know the sex-scene from the ground. So soon I had a model agency and started doing work for magazines, sex aids- or underwearcatalogues. It started to become more fun and more money. Then lms became a part, car-shows and striptease. AMS So how did you connect with the art-scene then? CFT Genesis, who would later become the front person of our band, Throbbing Gristle, was very important. I met Genesis way before I moved to London, which must have been around 1969. Actually, it was at an acid-party at Hull University. Then we moved to London in 1972.

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AMS Interesting that you say that Cosey. Maybe a good part of what Post Porn is about has something to do with the kind of relationship the pornographer has with his/her performers and audience. What are the intentions behind the porn? Making Post Porn comes from our desires to do something uniquely ours. It comes from our sexual urges, from wanting to express our selves, and to share our intimate ideas with other people. Whether we respect, or dont respect, our models, and our audience and ourselves, is an integral part of the nal creation. Visit the virtual home of the Love Art Laboratory at http://loveartlab.org Get Cosey Fanni Tuttis music at http://www.coseyfannitutti.com/

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Elizabeth Stephens, Annie Sprinkle and Cosey Fanni Tutti

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01 - 06 Annie Sprinkle performance at PPP in Berlin Photos Marietta Kesting

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Todd Verow

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Interviews 7 video camera then so I could have recorded them. I remember one where I had a bloody nose and used the blood to cover myself and my entire bathroom and then meticulously clean it before my mother got home. When I started making movies in art school (Rhode Island School of Design) I would always be both in front of and behind the camera. I did a performance/video piece called 10 in which I made an hour long two channel video that included images of me using map pins to mark the veins in my body, swallowing ten yards of cloth, etc. Then for the performance I suspended myself naked between the two monitors using only my head and feet to support myself. I was in the darkness, and the audience could not see me as I held my body stiff for the hour the tapes playedhen when the tapes were nished the light came up and the audience saw me and realized I had been there the whole time. For my rst lm, V is for Violet I was one of the main characters, posing for muscle movies in the 50s, then a leather clad hustler in the 60s then a swinger in the 70s and nally a businessman in the 80s. In another memorable short experimental lm during those years, Built for Endurance I shove a coke bottle up my ass. I have always seen my body as a prop, a canvas, to be used for my lms. There are people who produce porn but never watch porn, and there are people who enjoy both. Regarding the way I experienced you at the Porn Film Festival in Berlin in 2006, where you also sat in the jury, it seemed that you are more of the second kind, enjoying the alternative porn culture which is reemerging at the moment. Can you tell me a bit how you experience the hype surrounding porn and where you situate your practice in it porn ctions, alternative porn, gay porn, or just part of the porn family? Also, I want to know what porns you, after all these years of shooting yourself, still enjoy watching and nd inspiring and/or hot. I do enjoy both producing and watching porn, though I must say I think I enjoy making porn more these days. I can understand how some producers never watch porn; for me it is like watching movies. I have to be in the right mindset otherwise it is like work. I have to shut off my critical mind. The thing I nd so exciting about the alternative porn culture that is reemerging is how mixed it is. Straight, gay, lesbian, trans, etc., all coming together. That is something you never really saw in gay and lesbian lm. Its not just a polite acceptance of each others work; there is a genuine interest in each others lms and methods of working. My work is varied, some would say schizophrenic, but to me they are all related. My work in more mainstream gay porn, my alternative porn (or sexy art lms) and my experimental sex movies and my narrative work all inform each other. I often work on several projects at the same time so one scene for a porn movie would give me an idea for a narrative scene and vice versa. My styles may vary, but there is a distinct quality to my movies that runs throughout them all. Do you feel you t in the pornworld? Do you enjoy contemporary porn? I say this because its easy to see that your lms go beyond the typical clichs of (gay) porn. I have never felt like I t in. Not in the art world, not in the lm world or the gay world, certainly not in the stright world or the independent lm world, or even the underground lm world, but that is okay. I am ne with not tting in. I have always been an outsider and have grown to not just accept that but relish it. So I dont feel like a part of the alternative, gay or porn world. I enjoy porn that is not so slick, I always think there are too many lights on! I enjoy old porn, not just the movies themselves but the fact that they had to be seen in theaters; so they were really just backdrops for the action happening in the theater. That to me is exciting. Unfortunately you cant get that anymore. I wanted to be in that world. I hate the fact that lm-

I remember you doing your presentation at the very beginning of the PPP-symposium. After a very theoretical lecture on Derrida and Marx you came to the podium, took off your clothes and started your speech, called how to shoot sex scenes and become a porn star.. the moment was both very to the point and entertaining. What were you talking about in your presentation and how directly or indirectly did you touch on your presentations title? of course i also ask this as you are an independant gay lmmaker who doesnt always stay dressed and behind the camera while shooting your porn-ctions. I have never understood when people say they feel vulnerable when they are naked. I have always felt the opposite. There is no more powerful a feeling than being naked in a room full of clothed people. People are forced to react to you, whether they look at you or look away, whether they feel disgust or are turned on, whether they are embarrassed for you or ready to join you. As an artist it is my job to provoke and get a reaction. As someone who is in the entertainment industry it is my job to entertain, and as a comedian it is my job to get people to laugh. Whether they are laughing at me or with me doesnt matter as long as they are laughing. Is it easy for you to talk about your work? I am not an intellectual or a scholar or a critic, far from it. I am an artist, I work on an emotional, gut, sub-conscious level. If I even attempted to theorize about my work I would be lost, I leave that to the professionals. It is difcult for me to talk about my work. I prefer to let it speak for itself, that is why I make my lms, so they can speak for me. So when I am asked to speak about my work it is always best for me to think of the speaking as another piece of work itself. So what am I doing now? Writing about it? Is this another layer of performance? Can you ever reach the core? Or is it just like an onion? Layer after layer. Well, no, actually. Go back to the lms, like I said before it is all there. But you did do a performance about your lms. For my presentation or as I would prefer to call it my performance how to shoot sex scenes and become a porn star, my basic idea was to simply break the ice by saying how nervous I was and how much more comfortable I would be naked. So I stripped down to nothing and sat there with a microphone in hand and watched and commented on my lm Anonymous in which I am the lead character. In the lm my character engages in anonymous sexual encounters while trying to maintain a modern gay life in a monogamous relationship. For this performance, I am talking about shooting myself while I am naked on screen while the audience is watching me naked. I wanted to just be in that moment, reacting to myself onscreen and reacting to the audience. I would be interested in hearing whatever theories the audience had about my performance. Like I said at the beginning, you are also a performer in your own lms. Did this come out of a shortage of money and time or out of not nding the right performers, or was becoming a pornstar something you really wanted to do? I have always been both in front of and behind the camera, both guratively and practically. As a child I was always doing little performances. I was often home sick from school and would do elaborate productions for an audience of stuffed animals. I wished I had had a

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Interviews 7 pleasureful situations, not only having the story in your head, but also different actors and audiences in mind. I really enjoy making porn lms. It is like we all become a big family. The difcultlies come from the stigmas that are still attached to porn. This leads to actors not showing up, people only being interested in money. There also can be logistical problems like actors not being turned on or not liking their partner. Those are easier to deal with; you just have to have an open mind and patience. I refuse to shoot porn under a porn name. Im proud of my porn work.

going in general has become so slick and passive. I love the idea of a movie just being a backdrop, an impetus for sexiness. I think this has been replaced by amateur lm like the clips you can see on xtube and porntube, these clips made by men and woman of themselves and their sexual exploits that they then put online. I would love a return to more abstract, obscure porn (not so overly lit) combined with a new all-encompassing sexuality. I am working on a lesbian movie right now called The Final Girl that I am very excited about, and I would love to do something with trannie boys and girls. Can you tell me more about Bangor lms, its context and history? My creative partner James Derek Dwyer and I formed BANGORFILMS shortly after my rst feature lm Frisk in 1995. We were frustrated with how movies were made, with big crews of people standing around and lmmakers having to wait years to get there vision on lm. We wanted to make movies whenever we felt like it, with just me and the actors in real locations shooting with available light. Our rst movie was Little Shots of Happiness and after the sucess of that one in 1996 we vowed to make 10 features by 2000, mostly to prove that we could do it and because we had a bunch of ideas we wanted to do. After making those ten movies we calmed down a tiny bit, and since then we make about 2 movies a year. For infos check: www.bangorlms.com(somewhere else?) How is your relation to narrative? In porn, narrative is either referred to as a bad vehicle for sex scenes or as something which makes the sex scenes secondary. I think you can do a narrative lm with porn without it being cheesy or camp by rooting it in a charactor and/or charactors that are real, and the sex is a part of that realness. In narrative lm, sex is like violence; it is better if you can get inside the audiences head and suggest the scene, use the audiences imigination, to make the sex real. My movie Anonymous is narrative, but it is a movie about sex. The key is to make the sex as real as possible. For my porn movie I tend to keep the story to a minimum, there is very little set-up to the sex. It is something to watch to get off on (not that you cant get off to the narrative lms, but that is not their main goal.) Can you tell me a bit about the narrative of Bulldog in the Whitehouse... Bulldog in the White House came about because of this scandal in the Bush White House where this male prostitute was at all these press briengs and given press credentials that he was not qualied for. He was in the White House on hundreds of occastions so obviously he was fucking someone and most likey it was Bush. I was so angry because here was this juicy sex scandal and the press was ignoring it. It got me thinking about haw crafty the Bush adminstration was at spinning the truth, and that reminded me of Dangerous Liaisons. I read the book, and it reminded me so much of the Bushes that I immediately started adapting it. I new I had to make this cheap and fast, so I decided that it needed to be like a small community theater production. We were playing real characters, but we were all actors who barely knew our lines. It was fun and cathartic, and I was able to squeeze in just about all the Bush scandals. So it is an educational lm. You also did a documentary about shooting porn shooting your own. How difcult is it making porn and staying reective about the difculties of producing

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