Contribution to the investigation of the
TROPES OF PANSEXUALITY
The task to eroticise the world remains.
Market relations dominate sexuality, with personality-economic investments
in either steady pair relationships securing adaptive happiness
in the comsuption of a normal sex life or meat market transactions
in order to cultivate one’s brand and consume an allegedly “simple” pleasure
that actually uses to consist to a decisive extent of needs of exorting
power or needs of confirmation, thus compensatory needs.
All these worries. Always and everywhere getting more attractive,
improving one’s sexual technique, worrying about loosing
the specific sexual possibilities one’s succeeded to arrange,
or feeling unattractive or insufficient or totally worthless when not
having suceeded in arranging them. These perpetual sexual worries are
taken together not only the probably most important single source of
individual misery among us but actually to a large extent synonymous with
individual misery (this not the least because all other motives from
the certain viewpoints of popular psychology actually are only disguised
expressions of sexual worries. But also, it must perhaps be noted,
because it is easier for other types of unhappiness to appear as collective
rather than individual ones. Just like in other connections a great
portion of the solution usually lies in being able to expose the collective
and sopcial nature of the problems, to deindividualise them.).
Well, well. The whining about sexual misery not only keeps the individuals
convinced that they aren’t feeling well, but is also used to
sell everything, both small and big commodities, social relations and
political reforms. Some of them in an open and smple manner; everything
is easier to sell with a hint that it makes the buyer or the world
more sexy. But even more in a diffuse and automatic manner; the very
arousal of associations to sex gains attention (and ideas about content)
among sex-fixated (happily and unhappily alike) subjects. The parallell
movements of sexualising the market and marketing sexuality creates
a genuine porn-society.
And still we keep on playing, experimenting, feeling and inventing;
even with means and buildingblocks that the commodity-evolution has
offered us. Experiences that are available behind every corner in life
provide a reason for a militant defense of sensuality and imagination
in our relation to reality and to each other, and for resistance against
the general movement that tends to simplify, instrumentalise and commodify
every relation. On one plane, all of the activities that many engage
in to experiment and play in the sensual domain may be elements in
a wider striving to eroticise the world, that is reenchanting the world,
or if one prefers, exalting reality.
But it is heavy work. A book I recently read on psychoactive drugs
hailed MDA and others as “love drugs” – which meant
that these drugs made it possible to escape the demanding striving
for attaining orgasm, so one could engage in sex in a warm, sensitive,
lasting and rich way. Is it true? Are we so strictly programmed so
we require chemical therapy in order to open the field of erotic sensations
(as opposed to sexual achievements) at all?
Perhaps it’s still pedagogic to refer to drugs in this connection,
even though one of course doesn’t wish anyone to lead such a
boring life and have such an immobile imagination so that becomes the
only way of making unusual experiences. But still drugs provide paradigmatic
examples of how the senses can be awakened, and take in more than the
everyday obstacles and rationalisations normally allow, how small details
can become meaningful, fascinating and overwhelming, how fruitful deplacements
and crossconnections, new logical arrangements and unseen psychic dynamics
arise.
Actually these phenomena are of course essential moments in the poetic
experience: poetry is the very emblematic field for this meaning-producing
curiosity with experimental methods. Unfortunately the conceptions
of modern poetry are probably much less widespread and generally more
diffuse than the conceptions of drug experiences, so one has to refer
to the latter to make people understand what one’s talking about.
Beside poetry and drug experiences of course the same mechanisms are
put into motion by madness, by falling in loive and by dreamthinking
(- but please note how these all belong to different psychosocial situations.)
This orgasmothely (strict goal orientation towards
orgasm) together with the general fixation with penetration and the
general lack of imagination are the decisive factors in shaping contemporary
sexuality. In the widespread popular psychological distinctions between
male and female sexuality this is usually portayed as the natural and
objective expression of male sexuality. While the non-goaloriented,
subtile, emotional and ambient is classified as belonging to the female
sphere. Of course many may object that this doesn’t exactly cover
their own experience. Or that, if it actually would fit, there might
be the time to pose the basal queer question: how the hell has such
a sexuality originated among
us? But first and foremost we know that simplified classifications
of objective sex-differences usually turn out to be patriarchally ideological
tools. The aim is on one hand the obviously implicit; to discipline
and adapt to norm, and on the other hand the usually explicit one:
to de-guiltify and “increase understanding” between the
separated sexes; to decrease irritation and friction in maintaining
the (allegedly male) praxis of orgasmothelic penetration-fixation,
regardless of whether the purpose is consumistic-hedonistic-(individualistic-liberal)
or to safeguard a normal sexlife which is to be the glue in
a normal happy (bourgeois) pair relationship. The more pansexual (allegedly
female) sexuality in this model has basically nothing to teach us,
probably not even get in-quoted in the sexual repertoire, but rather
it shall be understood in order to be handled and utilised
for achievement-directed and normalising means.
There actually are antipornography militants who in all wellmeaning
have suggested that we must, in order to superceed the sadomasochistic-patriarchal-pornographic
shaping of our whole sexuality, make an effort to eroticise equality,
kindness, care and justice. Such a monumentally boring standpoint often
starts out from the insight from queer theory that sexual normality
is socially produced; then it ought to be posible to reorganise the
social programming and create another sexuality? Well, yes. But it
seems reactionary to try to shape it in a way that strives to abandon
all of the tension, transgression, wilderness, unreasonable fixation
and existential experimentation that makes sexuality remain a particularly
interesting sphere. Stripped of all this, it is very difficult to imagine
sexuality as something else than the dedramatised and conform “natural
plight” among others (food, sleep, politics, amusement, production
and perhaps prayer) that it usually is in political utopias (including
the social democratic ones and several of the christian ones – but
not in the Fourierist and a few more). When you’ve had it with
pornography in society and pornography within you, there is actually
something more engaging needed than socialdemocratic-anarchist wellmeaning
to undermine it. There is a need of unusual experiences and there is
a need for a more thorough refelction on what makes the exciting exciting
and the beautiful beautiful.
Queer theory made a huge contribution in popularly and strikingly
problematise normality, but in order to make it such an academic fashion,
and even more a striking bat for homosexual subcultures, it was necessary
to keep it simple and not too radical. Actually the motivation for,
and the consequences of, the larger part of queer theory and queer
jargon, probably has been nothing more than a narrowly liberal strengthening
of the legitimity of a certain assortment of deviations, particularly
whenever these are mere fetischist varietys of ordinary achievement-directed
orgasmotelic (even still penetration-fixed) consumistic hedonism. The
very same sexuality that has been established as normal but with slightly
different objects. To the extent it still mostly about men, the project
can be characterised as theoretical new thinking concerning where the
dick might be put, and a certain broadening of the selection of things
acceptable to eroticise, but still the aim is to get lighted in order
to put the dick somewhere and move back and forth until it comes; it
is not about eroticism possibly having a different strategy and meaning
than this.
Old Freud used to speak about the polymorphic perversity of the child.
In the queer genre there is some who like to employ the term, but with
it refer to an increased general sex-fixation and a liberal openmindedness
to the available variety of common fetischist fixations. If this term
is to be used it would be better to reserve it to trying to evoke specifically
the openness and the lack of fixation on genitalia and orgasms that
characterise child sexuality; discovering and hailing the erotic aspect
of various activities.
So, what activities and images that are engaging on a pansexual level
is what I intend to start exploring here. But it’ll just be a
little package of introductory suggestions. There always so much to
lay down concerning the conditions to begin with. I hope I’ll
get the opportunity to write part 2.
To begin with, I’d like to sketch analytically the triade perception – fantasy – outliving,
three aspects that creativity always moves between.
perception: availability; situation, atmosphere, curiosity, over-sensitivity
outliving: physique, praxis, expressivity, bodily happiness
the tropes of fantasy: phantasms and fixations; ideas and linguistic
complications turning flesh within the senses, the real lanes, bearings
and patterns of revery (this that Gaston Bachelard wrote books about
as “material imagination”.
Fantasies related to perceptions group around the functions that we
touched upon as “poetic experience” including drug jourenys,
falling in love, etc, all of these images where the wortld actually
becomes alive again, electrically charged with content, mysteries that
are just waiting to develop themselves or just spread a strange taste.
It seems to revolve a lot around synesthetics (how images sound, how
voices taste, how atmospheres look, how flesh sounds, etc) and subject-dissolving
(not having to be oneself anymore and instead trying to participate
in someone else, even in the world) and why not animism. Sometimes
it’s called empathy, the ability to really enter into someone
else’s experience, someone else’s body, the beloved one,
or an innocent stranger, an animal, a thing. Intercourse with all kinds
of entities.
This intercourse of course provide a transition to the aspect of
fantasies around living out: and a corresponding category of ambivalence
is grown in the fantasties about surrounding media: about how one is
surrounded, embraced, devoured, by the lake, night air, water fall
,fire, clouds, ice, mucus, cloth, honey, arms, the insect swarm, the
mouth of the predator, etc. Such experiences can often be cultivated
in specialised manners in everyday life, making one walk about as a
perverse perceiver feeling the different air environments, the different
grounds for the feet, the different materials of clothes, etc, that
one dwells among.
As more purely fantasties about living out all the forms of physical
automatism group themselves, the ones we are acquainted with as dancing,
swimming, perhaps fistfighting, certain types of acrobatics, why not
unrestrained sex. As particular tropes I believe some are more important
than others: those concerning oral possession (devouring bodyparts,
intersting objects, the object of love in its entirety, in order to
become one with them), those concerning hailing (to elevate, decorate,
paint on, sculpt the beloved one or whatever object one focuses upon,
transforming it into a work of art and a star) and those concerning
transformations (becoming different animals, monsters, plants, stones).
A transitory category is possible in the other direction too, from
living out to perception, through different kinds of metaphorical fantasies;
some are even well-known formulas like “mind-fucking” or
even better “devouring someone with one’s eyes” (think
about the concrete aspects of that, what a synesthetical oral possession
!).
The boundaires are diffuse and several fields are mined,
ephemeral or unreliable. The sublimation of romantical overheating
borders to the ideology of masochism. Sensual presence can become a
striving for well-being which,
if one’e really unlucky, may turn into helath-care, sound living
and positive thinking. All too often the ambitions of letting loose
and of being inventive have led to a gradual loss of interest in other
people and in ambiances and atmospheres. But I don’t accept the
idea that the settings of the erotic field would be so damned individual.
Of course, what specific forms one has discovered and keeps appreciating
most, is a question of individual conditions, experiences and temperaments.
But to go from acknowledging that to starting to believe in distinct
individual sexualitites, is just succumbing to concepts of
personality market, mixing up the cards, missing that we all are taken
into possession by an impersonal field of sexuality that contains the
whole spectrum of real possibilities. Imagination is not arbitrary.
Some things express the inclinations of imagination exactly, others
emerge from rational ideas or from simple arbitrariness, and those
are just more or less interesting lies and false gold. It is a purely
logical mistake to mix up the concepts and refer to wishes as dreams,
and to ideas as fantasies.
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