Hut Journal - October
"Language is a punishment. All things must enter into language and remain there according to their guilt."
Ingeborg Bachmann, quoted by Agamben
DEPRESSION
When I was in college, I used to go to bars, drink beer and write poetry, both of which are reasonable pastimes I suppose. I went back and looked at them recently and they all seemed uniformly horrible: bogged in depression, some sort of obscure longing that I could never pin down.
sitting here in the hut at 2 in the morning I felt those same inexplicable pangs. I could attribute it to various causes but I'm not sure that they wouldn't be just-so stories--some relation to reality but what? Sometimes it's just hard to live in the `personal'...in fact sometimes it seems impossible, life corkscrewing out of one's self without any rhyme or reason, just an incoherent spew of words and ideas and emotions; life as a puddle of mercury that you just can't get hold of and that splashes into the grass, metallic cum...
I don't write when I'm depressed anymore...hell, I CAN'T write when I'm depressed .. so what is that I am now? Who am I writing this to, for, toward?? I operate under the conceit that it's for me, a navigational guide somehow, maybe the exact opposite of those agonized sophomoric poems... tonight I know nothing, but feel a curdling around the edges of `reality', with `nothing' underneath...how would it be possible, O non-reader to convince you of this? to at least convince you of this FEELING i have? the answer is that is not possible. We all exist in our little bubbles of existence, spurting, spewing, gurgling...
But in the middle of this `phenomenological' net experiment, these things seem increasingly not to be even written to me, certainly no HELP to me, not even worth a good jerk-off fantasy from a good porn site -- certainly not therapy to me or anyone else. nothing. worth nothing. this is just automatic pilot territory.
The hurricane of the century off the coast tonight, high velocity winds smashing into the coast line, ten foot waves. It's a pity they're so far away.
9.17
STALL
Horse latitudes. Sargasso Sea. Mid-air stall. There are times when life just seems to float around me, no particular point, direction, or focus. Even if this journal is a self-serving enterprise, there occaasionally seems to be not enough self to serve. Oh, certainly there is always the temptation to give up my life, which I've done often enough in the past, to some job or someone. You only realize what vast amounts of time are given over to the other, of work, of companions, of lovers, when you basically have none of that except what you can meagerly constitute everyday, and what is not given to you as a necessity, as a whip that you have to bear up under, but as a gift, a shirt laid out on yr bed that you have to unwrap and don every day...it's at times as unbearable as the whip....
Under such circumsatances of finding myself becalmed (or beached even) I try to think of myself as some sort of unfurling filamentous creature far from the sun (you may remember the image from one of the first months of the journal dearest) extending itself into a giant diaphonous antenna, trying to pick up vibrations, waves, a clue, some evidence of either big bangs or even little bangs...
Other times it feels like those blink comparators wherein photos are taken of the same star fields and they are rapidly flicked back and forth, hoping for some sign of movement, some infinitesimal shift of some object at unimaginable distances, some interloper comet or meteor or god knows what careening across a static star field.
Our assumption is that everything is moving incredibly rapidly but, like those star fields and their apparent motion across the sky, what if that's really not the case? Where is our Blink Comparator for everyday life? For the most part we seem to have given up on the idea that there can be radical intrusions into that space of the now; nothing seems to perturb it and yet at the same time, it seems to be moving with breakneck speed over broken terrain...and then, though, sometimes it feels like when we've been into a movie theater and seen a particularly engrossing film, a world is created, and then we go outside into the light and it lingers still but then starts to fade into this immediacy of gas fill ups, a stop to buy some ibuprofen, remembering that unpaid bill....
Benjamin had it wrong (about cinema anyway): technical reproductions are about the instauration of a new reign of the aura...(and perhaps in some peculiar way, and false in the nietzschean sense in which all aesthetics constructions are `false' in an attempt at some other `truth', is our blink comparator), a gloss so shiny, thick and bright that it's hard to conceive of anything breaking through anymore. (isn't this precisely what "The Matrix" was about? But it itself was a shiny, thick, bright obscuring object!) Perhaps it is the case that through this new blink comparator -- we are CREATING the object moving through the field we are trying to scan and doing so in some way that is almost impossible to comprehend. The most we can do is to look at the finger instead of what the finger is pointing at (and tech has given us some mighty fine fingers to point with)..
At these times, this free floating `stall' feels like nothing so much as being at the extremities of this boxed universe of the everyday, all of its floating particulate matter, some variant of Dick's `kipple', being myriad of mirrors reflecting everything away from the periphery, all the gas fill ups, ibuprofen caplets, zipping of pants, turning of door knobs, more shiny reflectors, continually directing one through a maze of fingers curled in fists, some stupid fucking funhouse, tromp tromp tromp through it all day long, then exhaustion, even other people beginning to seem like nothing so much as shiny objects reflecting oneself, some endless monad careening through something that looks like some computer generated mirror-state space...
9.18
THE INFLUENCING NET
...and speaking of being interpenetrated (and /or interpolated as Foucault might have argued) by these spaces:
the following two stories were quoted by a therapist in a recent `Wired' magazine:
1) A 40-year old man shot himself in the face in response to a delusion that friends played an embarrassing prank on him. He says they placed on the internet photos of him masturbating and videos of him and his girlfriend having sex. He also believes his friends placed a link between his web site and his body so that when web surfers browsed on his site and hit certain keys, they could cause his extremities to jump
2) A 41-year old man claims he is a witch and that he runs an on-line service for new witches. He reports that he creates web sites for others, and he believes his powers are so strong that he can surf the internet suing only his mind. He also says that he receives magnetism from the internet each day at 2, 4, and 7 p.m.
Neither patient had any, or minimal, experience with computers or the internet.
9.20
MORE EVIDENCE
Once again everything comes back to this thing about `evidence': what IS evidence exactly? What constitutes either evidence or LACK of evidence? (it's the old, is absence of evidence, evidence of absence? or non-existence?
In doing some research on something called the Voynich Manuscript (about which more later), I joined a list serve devoted to deciphering this medieval manuscript which has so far, incredibly, resisted the probing eye and hand of the twentieth century, even as the pictures drawn in it have also resisted any sort of hard stylistic determination of time/origin--or even any idea what the pictures MEAN.
Recently on the list serve, the question has arisen as to the existence of native American Indian writing before the arrival of the Europeans...who, of course, immediately set to work burning whatever middle American codex they could find, conceiving them to be the work of the devil.
That's certainly one way to `fix' evidence for the future: destroy it in the past, then your ancestors won't be in any sort of moral muddle when time and attitudes shift, as they always do. And how many times has such `tilting of the table' to provide better odds, happened? I would think that minor manufacturing of evidence happens almost continually in one sense, but also that at major contact points between cultures it happens in a major way, almost as if cultures carried their antigens mostly hidden until the threat of infection form an outside agent or culture happens.
Another assumption I would make is that, while all cultures would find it necessary to wrangle evidence which a radical other provides and `pretzelize' it into a configuration acceptable to its own cultural norms, it would seem that the culture which has mastered this stacking of the deck is the Judeo-Christian western culture, the culture of the Book and the Machine.; it's history is one of an extreme allergic reaction to any sort of cultural norm other than it's own. (I realize the problematic nature of that statement: how in fact did `it's own' come into existence? Is there something in the initial constellation of elements which gave it such a viral intensity? Is the result merely of millennia of assimilation of others, and of THEIR tricks of adaptation and co-option that has made any sort of congress or intercourse with it such a dangerous thing? The latter position is the `rational' and scientific position -- and this is a position where one could accuse its proponents of being social Darwinists I suppose; and it is at this point that name calling on both sides takes over the place of evidence and evidence of POWER is the only evidence that is then needed. Any opposition to this gradualist/diffusionist/liberal `we've all created this mess' point of view is immediately labeled obscurantist, occult, `lacking in evidence', irrational and so on.
I was at an artist friends house and had started my rap about ancient Egypt and subterranean currents of influence which somehow manifest themselves millennia later in a culture. Having been an anthropology student much earlier in his career, such an hypothesis was immediately too much to accept...but in may be that the very thing that condemns any such counter evidence is also the very thing that has saved it, that is, it becomes severely tainted `evidence' and is slotted into a fantastic imaginary, or witchcraft, or `popular delusions', or the occult and so on...and in a liberal culture what can't be accepted can be classified and hence made safe since the master coding system is safe from tampering; once a western classificatory system is installed, there's not much that an alien culture can do to combat western `evidence' or claims of LACK of evidence....and probably the first line of that cultural defense/classification mechanism is language itself. Once a language is in place, it could be that certain scaffoldings follow naturally from that (at least that's what Whorf-Sapir thought; their theses is in decline I believe but that could also be a result of the sheer steamrollering of western culture over all other cultures...the phenomenological evidence -- i.e., living, speaking inhabitors of such world systems -- for such a view is rapidly disappearing -- and evidence is NOTHING if it is not allied with the power of a representative of a culture which has not been laid flat by western technological culture...when all those representatives have died or been killed, their lives, stories. ontologies, epistemologies become nothing but `just so' stories, archived and stacked neatly in the repositories of Western Civ 101....We will assimilate you! We ARE the Borg!!
So the thesis that somehow coded within a mainstream liberal culture is ANOTHER code, one that would have the power to detourn the direction of Western culture, is almost invariable greeted in middle class academic culture as an anathema of the highest order, subject only to ridicule and certainly not serious consideration -- I mean, after all, there's not even any EVIDENCE! (Television is a good example. I listen to it in the other room sometimes and it turns everything into a froth of laugh tracks or techno anthemic headline marches or `structural' exhortations to keep `movin' on up' to that dee-luxe apt. in the sky. I am tempted to say: there can BE no darkness on TV, no matter how great the catastrophe...not sure how the net fits in to my simplistic thesis--it's almost as if no matter how hard it tries to imitate TV, a certain shadowy realm of rumour, conspiracy, innuendo derails it, a dimmer moon to the television sun.)
9.24.99
OK so sue me...that's stuff that crosses my mind every day....so you want some feelings, some scenarios, some narratives of this paltry life, this thin gruel that passes for existence much of the time (heh, heard a line from a B-52's song yesterday: "This is not a good existence...") Well, some things I don't WANT to give you; already the line between what you take from me and what I choose to give you seems vanishingly small. You need to allow me a little breathing space, y'know.
I'll only say this: that our lives, OK MY life, seems increasingly to be made up of some sort of repeating patterns. (I've told you about this before so don't push me...) And as regards relations with the opposite sex (BAM! there it is, that's what you were looking for isn't it?), I am at a loss to make sense of it. That is, I can make all too good sense of the pattern but I don't know what it means...I can even MAP the pattern, a one to one correlation of items, which shrinks any available pool of partners drastically, in fact to one (or since it is a pattern, successive ones)...so is there supposed to be a culmination, where the pattern stops? Is this pattern a little loop that will play itself out and another `pattern' will emerge? (I never used to think in terms of a `pattern' until a few years ago---have I become `imprinted' in some way, such that I can only perceive those (women especially) around me in certain ways, i.e., through this `pattern filter lens'? Language falters a little bit here even as it bolsters this `uncanny effect' (and that is what it feels like, a sort of vibrating, Moiré effect, superimpositional differences). At some point you just have to be there in the vibration and not always be trying to take a snapshot of it. Besides which, I'm out of film.
9.27.99
A dreary Monday. how will it ever be possible to keep this thing going until the year 2000??! It's beginning to seem difficult enough just to get it from week to week. And the fact that I'm beginning to repeat myself is proof of that I guess. If nothing else, it's good for showing the depth of my limitations -- or maybe also the depth of the limitations of the relations between `life' and `writing' -- or rather writing as some sort of incantation directed at life, filtered through the randomizing process of readership that constitutes the net...because EVEN if one (i.e., me) is writing, or DECLARES that one (i.e., me) is writing for one's self -- and yet is making it available on a global publishing organism --I originally typoed `orgasm' -- what can that possibly mean??! At the very least a certain level of denial/subterfuge...or/and some sort of re-figuring of what constitutes the porous line between the public/private via the net (cautiously remembering those two case histories above where the line was totally erased...I have, in fact, felt/feel the pull of those disorders myself--some would say that part of my problem is that I succumbed to them-- and some would perhaps say that the net's twin concerns of sex [porno sites] and con-spiracy [`breathing together'] show off those liabilities/labilities--but to think about it in that way -- which is really the most facile, journalistic way of proceeding seems to miss something else that's going on...to mistake the waves that pass our little boat for the darker, much larger elsewhere....and it's that `elsewhere' that gives everyone pause, either because: 1) a perception by many that scientifically an `elsewhere' -- of many sorts -- can't exist now (or perhaps `anymore'), unless it is `scientific', that is, outer space, the quantum, etc.; 2) it's of little consequence, tech has superseded all `elsewheres' (um, I would rather say that tech has MAGNIFIED them); 3) `elsewheres' exist but, like the relation between quantum reality and Newtonian reality, there is only the here and now, hic et nunc, which is of any consequence (the only fly in that ointment is the human brain and the things it conceives, both fictive --art-- and real--science: what exactly is their status OUTSIDE the precious confines of the human brain??)
certainly part of this journal thing is trying to get a better look at the squiggles seen out of the corner of one's eye--it's too bad that turning to look at them doesn't work, since they are apparently part of the perceptual/linguistic apparatus itself AS WELL AS part of the `landscape' -- or rather that `landscape' is a much denser, deeper mesh and weave than we can possibly account for.
But generally I would have to say that this `elsewhere phenomenology' --not new by any means, but `newness' wasn't a criterion for doing it afterall; here is where the line between therapy and research becomes vanishingly thin -- hasn't had much in the way of results I suppose, except for this: I've found that uncanniness --or at least one form of it -- exists between and among people, woven in and amongst the communicative strands that we use to hold and repel (to push away)/ rappel (beating of the drum, call to arms)/repel (down a mountain, pushing off, returning, pushing off, returning) each other, in rhythms and repetitions that square off and round the corner, night and day, seasons after season, millennia after millennia ...
I HAVE begun to feel some of those tension/relief syncopations amongst us humans--and to some degree to feel my own bit of `uncanniness' into the mix...what on earth would one feel, be able to `see', if one lived to be hundreds of years old!
Patterns would no doubt begin to enter one's life which would open up whole new orders of existence, true elsewheres that lie all about but which can't be tapped because of our pitiful life spans; we would begin to live a Gamelan orchestra of a life with the thumping of extinctions, the pulsing of stars, underpinning the closer syncopations of arrivals and departures of the mayfly existences around us, together with regular stuttering and stammering of everyday life, impossible polyrhythms --would we be able to handle it all? Perhaps we would simply wind up as another case history....
8.30
The dull, pained throb of domesticity. of just being here and going through the paces--what anathema to certain types of folk! And what oscillations it throws them into--like L. searching for some unwholy grail of stability while continuing to throw gasoline into the fire, as someone once told me, under other circumstances, too smart for her own good...but smart sometimes in ways even SHE didn't realize....
How odd then to read this new book by William Gass (Reading Rilke) and find so eloquently expressed ONE'S SELF there, one's lovers there...not exactly depressing--more like ...disorienting, a victim of bilocation perhaps. I see myself wandering outside myself, some vagrant sitting on someone else's front stoop. maybe it's the case with all of us all of the time and that language somehow solidifies that vagrancy, makes it real and errant through the wreaths of words we exhale, or some golden braid thrown into the future, dimly disappearing, faint mysterious tugs from time to time, beckoning...
or even worse, this: "Language is a punishment. All things must enter into language and remain there according to their guilt." (Ingeborg Bachmann, quoted by Agamben)
10.1
WHY MONKEYS HAVE A "'MILITARY'
I was out biking on the silver comet bike path today (those [?] who have accompanied me on this fatiguing hut trek know what I'm talking about ) when I noticed an older couple stopped in the path ahead. I stopped to see what the problem was and saw that a snake had stopped them. It was on the far side of the 8 ft slab of asphalt but they thought it was poisonous and couldn't brink themselves to cross. There's no way the snake could have gotten to them, it wasn't even coiled up, just a small snake (actually I think it was venomous from it's markings)...I volunteered to pass on by with the bike and as I was doing so, the snake reared back, the woman let out a scream and I nearly fell off the bike into the ditch. The man then made it across finally and the woman just kept dancing back and forth, grimacing and groaning. We discussed snakes a bit as I drove off, kidding about the `hoop snake' we knew as kids.
There were a good many people on the path and I wondered how the snake would fare. About 30 minutes later as I was returning I noticed that someone had taken a concrete block and smashed the snake into a pulp as well as completely shattering the block, which had to have been brought from a little distance.
10.2
Does one see one self MORE clearly or less clearly when one has arisen in the morning? The haggard, worried, lined face staring back at me from the slightly fogged bathroom mirror....is that truly me?...or simply the me left over from the night's struggles, wrestling with me like some ocean turning over the shoreline, leaving only some dead seaweed, flotsam and jetsam, receding from the face, leaving its agonal debris behind.
There often seems to be another me looking out of those spaced out eyes, wondering who IS this, how'd he get hold of my body!!
The great softener of those perceptual lines is love - and the very thing that put them there in the first place.
----
I went to see Derrida at Emory yesterday give a memoriam for Lyotard, part of a two day conference. It was an overflow crowd, milling about, being directed to other rooms with televised relays. I realized looking around that there was no one from the local art scene to speak of, only one or two people that I recognized anyway ... such an incredible divide there. Probably the most famous -- certainly most notorious -- philosopher of the latter half of the twentieth century, and where are the artists, thinkers, `strategists' even? Presumably most `artists' in Atlanta have at least heard of him -- but then that is a presumption one should be careful to make.
And it's true there was a charismatic buzz in the air -- but that is surely something an artist should be interested in. No, Atlanta feels like a tightly inflated balloon. If it were to go beyond itself, beyond its concerns for its front yard, and the family it fronts, its community `sincerities', it would go down in tatters, flapping in the breeze of its own small town hot air.
----
I went in this morning to see the last two presentations of the Lyotard memorial/conference. In the middle of Philippe Bonnefis' disquisition of butterflies, cats and the veil of Maya, I put my hand to my face and was over come with the smell of peppermint and decay, drifting from the two fingers under my nose and which, like Proust's cookie evanesced into scent, in its ecstatic transport has not quite left me; it's easy to see how the ecstasis of the genitals (a mean's in particular, with a `mind of its own') can be equated with the nose, which has its own birth to presence and peculiar drift from the body, leaving one mesmerized by the omnipresence of ...not the past exactly, though it seems to resemble some `before', but some barely perceptible otherness, yet familiar .. so familiar. and yet there is no referent for it...the `peppermint decay' emanates from my fingers but I KNOW it's not the smell of fingers, not the smell of the room, but some sort of concatenation of smells that yet seems to lift above themselves, pointing to SOME kind of invisible presence (no wonder saints are said to exude the scent of roses--perfect exemplar of parousia, some long past return, if just from the reptilian hind brain, Jesus as Serpent, co-entwined everpresent possiblities....
There are times when these smell take up an EXTRAORDINARY amount of my thought processes (like the last few days), drifting in and out of my consciousness with increasingly ferocity, and then, like the tonal shift this morning, throwing me for another loop, left, lupine-like, sniffing, sniffing, trying to pin it down, always to no avail. At least with a Madeleine there is a concrete past dipped into, macerated, swallowed, some enjoyment from recollection and knowing there WAS a past....but this....this....smell thing: like a name infuriatingly on the tip of the tongue, just out of reach. Unlike the name, which is always out there....where is the home of the smell, where is the fondness turned over in memory? and to know that smell is actual presence, there are particles, substance of the thing smelled in one's body, one's nose ---maddening and ecstatic at the same time.
Here, like this quote I came across last night from the Gass book on Rilke:
"To smell ourselves cloud like steam from a warm cup,
to hear voices, to listen so intently you rise straight from the ground."
10.3
PAIN
I had what amounts to a date recently, the first one in a long time to tell you the truth. And to tell you the other part of the truth it was only partly a date. I seem only to find unworkable situations of any interest lately. A long time ago someone once accused me of only being interested in inaccessible women. Not true....I just find that certain women are shot through with a kind of visible darkness that one can glimpse and the possibility of a fall into that, as deadly as it seems, seems incredibly alluring.
The difference now being that I have some knowledge of this frailty on my part. a frailty which P. covered over perhaps--or maybe even made me susceptible to in some fashion? ..and that mythic fate sealed by L. no doubt, my fair Eurydice.
I see now that there are some words, sentences, which CAN'T be read until one has passed through a certain threshold of pain in one's life...(The fact is that there is considerable pain throughout one's life; the pains of adolescence, as banal as they often seem in retrospect, are just as horrific at the time as those of later `adult' life--but later pains begin to ramify, building on earlier pain, becoming a thicket of scar tissue, the arrival of each new pain threatening to rip off the scabs that have just grown over the old pains.) It sometimes seems, not always but often, that we are nothing but rinds composed of these assaults and insults, thin tissues of hurts surrounding some void, separating it (which is us) from another void (which masquerades as them, those other collections of cicatrices)...
And now here I am attempting to add another layer of scar tissue with S., working, I must say, against the odds...But on the other hand, I'm trying to re-figure that idea of scar tissue, become more playful with it, less attached to it...(I think often time we are attached to our scars by a moral ligature, that if we lose sight of the scar we lose sight of the a world, the person who created it, we crassly discard them. It's a heavy thing to admit (and you who read this without pain have no way to read this) but there are times when one HAS to discard the other, when one has to move past the intolerable point of not being able to forget NOR to forgive. One's only hope is that the fine grit of time will eventually wear off the scar, leaving some semblance of new skin beneath, ready for fresh whiplashes, at least one would be able to FEEL again....
Because `forgetting' doesn't work, it's always too active, always trying on new clothes in the closet you've shut it in, coming out a loose panel in the back...and we seem often times to be nothing BUT this matrix of associations...and to lose that or part of that, seems tantamount to loosing part of ourself. So we resist. When a scalpel is necessary since the only thing that forgets pain is more pain...
And while pleasure feels expansive, always wants to increase, pain is crimped and cramped, curtailing ones view, shutting off everything into a tight red circle. Which has a perverse comfort factor to it, I admit, it puts boundaries on the world that pleasure seek to foil. Pain has a sort of articulation about it (the voluminousness of de Sade speaks to that) and a push, death-ridden or not, that pleasure finds it hard to deal with but then even pleasure is tainted with that dark writing, as Freud endlessly articulated. And the place of this painful articulation generally is language. If we had no language would be in pain? Not of a certain sort of pain I think, a pain which knows itself--this opens to a disturbing thought that if they are higher orders of being(s) then they are `higher' by virtue of a greater degree of articulation, hence penetrated by incredible torrents of pain, and out of that comes even greater `constructions', or, really, circumscriptions, of reality, that tight red circle expanding a bit. And from that view, our god would be our devil, forever prodding us into action with red-hot pokers, the only expansiveness that is allowed pain, unlike the `natural' incorporations of pleasure, being articulation, a melancholic (melancholic because there is still a bit of flesh attached to this coded `bone') re-inscription, re-coding...these `higher beings' then would be -- nothing BUT articulation, pure code we might say now, the only `pleasure' given them being `encryption', a bit of secrecy, hiding themselves from themselves, much as DNA hides itself in the flesh of the body. But the problem now is that `the code' is being stripped of its other components, and now wants to be seen as pure being -- but as we know from our mythology/bible, such creatures (which we hide) are only seen under great duress and PAIN, and that any culture which seeks to become pure code will be involved in the infliction of inordinate amounts of pain, in fact apocalyptic, chiliastic pain, pain which sears the flesh from the bones, and then separates the bones into air as the code seeks release from its `imprisonment'. And this desire to purge is insidious, not only belonging to jack-booted thugs in search of domestic and racial purity but reaches into the heart of articulation itself, into language, into machinic desire, into this luminous white space we, you and I, are both falling into my dearest (you are still with me aren't you? like some worm in the apple, a bug in the code, a gremlin on the wing, a finger on the pencil, on the button, on the clit, just a bite, crash, bang, word, explosion, orgasm away...)
In fact, I now see the wisdom of this line from Holderlin which I have quoted before and now seems to make perfect, frightening, sense:
"...at the extreme limit of pain,
nothing remains but the conditions of space and time."
10.4
PLEASURE
In the nether regions of my cable TV service I came across the encoded hard-core porno channels. late at night, for some reason the coding seems to relax a bit and the image becomes intelligible, albeit drastically color shifted to vivid neons, interspersed with flickering, traveling bands across the screen, slice `n dicing cocks and cunts and tits and ass and then suddenly blooming into lurid glory.
It's basically the same thing over and over but with endless recombinations and permutations around the small theme of fucking, each different actor/actress ringing the changes slightly different-always the same, the men woodenly, almost expressionlessly, going about their task, while the women, especially when they are in scenes with each other, all become St. Theresa in ecstasy, all pivoting, swirling about that central genital point, going down then straight up in trembling shudders, erotic technicians completely caught up in their task, tending the tail end, so to speak, of this vast libidinal machinery. (There are those who equate it with wrestling in it's facade and a bit of fakery, except at the other end of the spectrum: instead of taking advantage of the human lust for agonal displays with its subsequent physical component, as does wrestling, pornography riffs on the human need for `love' and the physical connections it inspires. And undoubtedly they are both `fake' in some fashion, the wrestlers don't really hate each other, don't hurt each other as badly as they seem, and the sex stars aren't really `in love', don't follow the social scripts that the rest of us have to, even though they no doubt do `care for' their acting partners--but perhaps no more than do the wrestler and his opponent...although if I had to choose as to which fakery to participate in, it would probably be the pornographic....)
And sometimes it seems to me, as I'm clicking around all over the cable, that here is the heart of the whole enterprise of `popular entertainment' laid out in its neon glory, its repetitious schematic which gets fleshed out in endless sitcoms and dramas, those ALSO swirling about much the same libidinal point but with laugh tracks and car crashes to keep us deferred, an endless string of/from matter combining, to DNA attempting to combine, to humans attempting to merge, to ideas trying to multiply.
So after you get past the threatening part of pornography (and a very large part of it IS threatening and for this reason:) then it turns into a sort of pure logic of bodily combination, becoming a comforting proleptic to `ordinary' life's sex's abstruseness, turning what is so often thought to be the natural sequelae of relationships, i.e., fucking, into its precondition, revealing the rhizomatic but random mat that we all rest on. And yes this is threatening because it threatens to collapse all life into a sort of Spinozean geometry of desire that precludes all the superstructures which desire, when thwarted, bodies forth, threatens to turn us into those lubricious little Bonobo chimps who fuck EVERYBODY in the tribe, as greeting, as comfort, as solace, as farewell, and just for monkey reasons no doubt....and maybe it is also true that any time a code is a) discovered and b) decoded there is anxiety -- even if its a code as well known as fucking (but actually while it IS well known there seems endless difficulty in deciphering the hieroglyphics of fucking, the entwined symbols spinning us off into regions that make it hard to think....) Will the message tell us what we already know? or tell us what we don't know and would rather not hear? And maybe it's the case that all such messages revolve around the geometricity of the void -- just one more step, at the point of raw code revealing itself, and you're in the abyssal punctum, nothing left.