City has sex

Is pretty, even beautiful – slouched against a wall, holding an unlit cigarette between his lips/her lips – and almost smirking – at each other, at themselves. Someone takes out a pack of matches, strikes one against the strip, a flame flares up. Short hair – still looks like a girl. Later says – pretend that I’m a boy. In the meantime, conversations overheard. A DJ spinning handbag hip-hop, electronica, in-fashion music. Smoke trails lingering in the air lazily. Someone, him or her, says something. Somebody else says something else. As if it mattered - with the volume of the music, nobody hearing anybody anyway, except the keywords. Like: nothing in particular to do tomorrow, do you have the time, etc. Bar closes for the night. They kiss each other outside in the rain. Drunk on whisky, sometimes high on cocaine. Some idea they go somewhere, come down on hash – -whoever lives the closest. Just a twenty-minute walk from here. A tall, thin house next to a church, behind a squatted warehouse. Water spits against a narrow basement window. Looks through his music, flips on something slow and laughs a little bit - begin to take each other’s clothes off. Wonders about nothing, not important - some things just do not make sense, some do – this time, or the next one. And – nobody really cares. First time, fourth time, fifteenth time around, all before she turned nineteen. Shrug - something fun to do for free. Is never reckless. Simply likes to meet people. Also: play a new game every night. The first one – not exactly, but a landmark case – crazy psycho card game – ‘crack the code’ – grinning and grinding each other slowly down with red wine, marijuana, paranoia – so completely they could feel it in their stomachs, other places also – finally, left speechless; with nothing meaning anything, but everything – still somehow – meaning something: ‘I have always told the truth, never the whole truth.’ And now? Just accepts, sometimes actively and sometimes not, the collage formed out of the pieces of her partners lives she shares, for whatever time they give her. Asks for nothing else. And if you tried to give her something more she wouldn’t take it, wouldn’t even know what she should do. ‘Should do’ - case in point. ‘There are no rules’ is just another one – an injunction to be free, explore sexuality, be liberated - on crippling pain of inauthentic being. An infinite demand somehow to be freer, more liberated, freakish and unique. In other words, sex aestheticized – in fantasy clubs like Torture Garden – people dress up, take drugs, fuck. The pinnacle of contemporary sexuality? A spectacular enactment of the map for the territory? Or just another aspect of the world accelerated? People in priest and doctor costumes, nurse and punk and sailor costumes, all encountering each other in a space, and interacting in some way. This happens everywhere. The only principle of difference regards the velocity at which these events take place. In fact, in some ways, the Torture Garden represents amongst the most conventional of social spaces that could possibly be imagined – amongst the most rigidly coded and strictly enforced rules, philosophy and language, of any club in London. And following the same line of thought, also among the most depoliticised. Political strip, slow dance in no-time. Torture Garden attendees externalise themselves as sexual agents in the form of fetishistic costumes, some more subtly than others. The rationality behind this, wear your desires on your sleeve – it is demanded by the fantasy market inside the club in order to maintain the velocity of circulating flows of sex and drugs. In other words, there is nothing in the Torture Garden model that deviates in any way from the mainstream. Or perhaps in one single way. The markedly lower levels of hypocrisy and lies than exist in other ‘normal’ clubs. Through embracing so spectacularly the central tenets of late-capitalist economics the Torture Gardens functions as a kind of hall of mirrors through which contemporary society refracts itself indefinitely, twisting it into shapes and patterns, some strangely familiar. A priest sodomises a schoolboy. A rabbi takes off his robes, reveals his lacy panties, masturbates and watches as a banker fucks a worker in the ass. Life goes on. Should we be shocked? After all, events in the real world can now only intermittently arouse our sustained attention. Perversion. Once upon a time an accusation levelled by the mainstream at its fringes, before its reclamation by the philosophers Deleuze, Foucault and others as something that in some sense is liberating. And now? Perversion is the norm. There is no way back. The sexual fetishism of the Torture Garden finding its correlative in the commodity fetishism of the market, no aspect of either any more or less performative than any other – the macho gender identity of a shaven-headed England football fan just as deliberately and painstakingly constructed as that of a drag queen, or a nun, for that matter. Drinking Pepsi, shooting junk. The whole city is now queer, with neither any mainstream nor any deviance, instead simply a horizontal plane – with no pinnacles or troughs – only technocratic politics of sexual identity, which is to say, no kind of politics at all. Power is desire, desire power – the modern matrix of a sexual relationship from which no escape is possible. The television flickers in the corner, sound turned down, on Sex in the City, HBO – four female stereotypes, on an imaginary island called Manhattan, mouth lines written for them by two gay men, wearing a different dress in every scene that passes. Samantha, from pseudo-feminist, to whore, to sex-addict – age simply overtakes her. Miranda, who in-exchange for her ironic distance is eventually rewarded with a husband and a baby. Charlotte, sucrose fairy-tale princess punished with divorce. And Carrie Bradshaw, finally attaining ‘Mr. Big’ – a figure entirely subtracted from any content, even the minimal consistency of a human name; a walking, talking phallus thrown up on the screen as the final paragon of feminine desire. Not even of – as the title of the show would seem to claim, sexual desire – this is a program that concerns the fortunes of four, white, bourgeois women in the marriage market, the partner market – and which finishes with every single one of them finally settled down, cocooned in blissful two-ness with a penis and a wallet. Is this it? Something is lacking somewhere and at the risk of sounding sentimental – is it love? In the Torture Garden sex games? In sexuality itself – sometimes cold and sometimes hot, cynical, political, romantic, spiritual, aesthetic or simply economic. But does it matter? Is the whole idea not now a zombie concept, in our post-modern present, without truth, history or fixed identities? Maybe not, in any case evidence suggests increasing desperation. Single white female seeks: good sense of humour, companionship, relationship – except that we now know, the sexual relationship does not exist, and is only multiples of multiples, with lesser or else greater faith invested. And is this even new? Or has it not always been the case? What exists today within the context of the art-scene as a talking point, maybe a pick-up line; and within the militant gay community as secondary to sectarian political concerns, is not really ‘it’ – this having been excluded, the remainder of an unbalanced equation. Rendering it visible changes desire into something that it seemed somehow - in someway - not to be before – but somehow in some sense always was. A master dressed in leather in a dungeon whips her slave then licks and kisses his wounds softly. Love? Or just a different aspect of humiliation, this one beneath the sign of pity, flipping the meaning of the whole performance from sadism to masochism – who am I – and it is always I – to hurt another person, in this way. I am just another, and never so alone, as shuddering in the moment of an orgasm. There is no law except do as you will. And: love is indeed the law. The increasingly intense glare of the impossible, the real, the void, the same thing - Lisa, writing a dissertation on the word ‘it’ – Rebecca, with her interest in aesthetics and especially the theme of pain. Process of letting go - of all illusions, end not-specified and arguments it can’t be, not at all. In any case: chauvinistic abstract logic – reversion to generics. In any case: queer solidarity is increasingly falling to pieces as it swells in size and mainstream influence. Without a myth of generalized opposition to sustain it as a cohesive political community, the community has/is splintered/splintering - individuals are being recuperated by the mainstream underneath the liberal sign of laissez-faire. So long as they were both in some sense marginalized sexual agents, a butch dyke and a fairy queen could be said in some way to have something in common. This is no longer the case. Militant lesbians now reject the label ‘queer’ as implying white gay male. Unlike in other, smaller European cities, gay men and women frequent different, specialized clubs and bars and do not necessarily socialize together with each other in the space of the same sexual market any more or less than either does with straights: queer identity is rationalizing - within a market that treats everything, essential or otherwise, as choice, there is money to be made. It is this fact that is ironically decried by conservative commentators issuing a clarion call for a return to tradition, family values, Tory ethics, while at the same time supporting market economic policies that destroyed those values in the first place, melted them to nothing. Simply, the market dictates. It was always shot straight though with sexuality, and love, it has always capitalized upon them. The present situation, marked by dislocation, alienation, decentralization, speed – functions like a spin-cycle. The lightest elements, already pulled into the centre, have blended into one another – the heaviest ones, at the periphery are the only ones still visible. From the centre they appear as shadows, things that don’t belong. From the periphery, the centre looks like vapor; hollow, empty, cold. This is indeed the dynamic, never static, and the beat goes on.

You're just too good to be true...

This pretty boy is getting slugged around a squalid Queens apartment. He went there willingly, and should not really be surprised. His instinctive body is radiating threat, but his face is cool and showing no emotion: he may as well not be there.



For whom exactly is this scene taking place, and where? In the room itself, nothing but silence is being spoken: it is just a combinative there. A fist hits a mouth and draws blood, and then two men fuck like a duty. No anxiety, no hesitation - and is this not pure sex itself? The eternal dream of sex, how sex itself imagines sex. A mechanical algebra of bodies colliding, and nothing sublime or sacred at all.

But then why these bodies in particular: why have they combined tonight, and why in this way? This skinny kid, really just a social ghost, and his adult partner, really just a thuggish tool of forces. The former, believing hardly and sincerely in his own cold and careful absence, who wants to be more other than the others. The latter, more present than presence itself, desiring desperately, with his whole heart, to be more like the others than they are themselves.

If this means violence, so be it, so long as the harsher violence is avoided - in this variation, Jane Eyre, once become Jane Eliot, never must become Jane Eyre again. The trauma turns precious, and transfigures itself into the secret-as-such. "I just hate when they look like Tarzan, and talk like Jane," observes Neil imperiously, following the staggering insult of some cursory politeness, and the real point here is that it is appearance itself which has become prohibited. In contrast to the hysteric Brian, reaching for the safety of the screen memory, Neil is properly psychotic: he recognizes no distance whatsoever between his desire and society, and thus recognizes within himself no sovereignty at all. This is how he deliberately abjects his identity, and carefully turns himself into an object without will, to be passively carried along by the libidinal flows of the world, come what may.



It is this paradoxical determination of sovereignty, sovereignty geared on the ground of the absolute absence of sovereignty, to which the figure of the rent boy owes his supreme status as the modern avatar of authenticity. Is there any subject less oedipalized, in our post-Freudian age, than the subject who consciously fucks surrogate fathers for money? Even the junkie pales in comparison, since his lack of direction is clearly still self-indulgence, requiring perpetual material reiteration; thus the contrasting fortunes of the memoirists J.T. LeRoy and James Frey. The latter, his cover story of significant suffering exposed as fraudulent, finds himself summarily exiled from the contemporary literature scene; meanwhile, the former, who never even existed, and whose literary construction represented a far more extensive and calculated dishonesty, is categorically exonerated on the grounds that 'a touching expression of longing, suffering, love, and endurance is not disqualified simply because it issues from a construct. He exists because if words and stories resonate and move the reader, then it matters not that the hand writing them signed another's name.'



Move the reader, fine, but move them where - and whose fantasy is this anyway? The answer is surprising. The social scenography of this character, passionately clinched in the name of the real by a whole gamut of fashionably transgressive writers, who in their fiction had already written him into existence, clearly, if J.T. LeRoy did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, and indeed, so it proved. But what precisely is being invented here is in fact not really a fantasy itself, but rather a symbolic screen, enabling fantasmatic projection. The rent boy, as the one who himself needs no imaginary screen, and thus by this special heroism, serves to incarnate the pious dreams of this world.

Sacred Hearts

Mark k-punk, for once, is dead wrong: Substance D is not speed.

It is rather the Drug.

The eternal model of everything drugs already are, and would like to become. Like the bloated brain of Einstein dissected into tiny pieces, the bloated corpse of Jimi Hendrix gently leaking benzedrine and wine. There can be no empirical approach to these objects since the divine spark they incarnate - the divine social spark - smartly evades objective analysis.

It is true that speed carries with it this spark. The socio-historical fact of the speed cult clearly attests to this fact. But it goes too far to conceptually privilege speed - even in such circumstances where speed really is privileged, since to make this move means forgetting inexorably the motor at the heart of addiction.

Radically, this motor amounts to an essential motor; a real drive towards the essential itself. The addict remains addicted to the extent that he has still not succumbed to the abyss completely, to the extent that he still insists on the presence of a manifest screen discretely seperating him from the void. In fact, this imperative is not even wrong: some kind of minimal formal reification - some kind of minimal transcendental model - is finally required by every subject, in order to ward off psychosis. But the addict subject goes further: he believes in the empiracle existence of some particular physical object magically willing and able embody it.

It is thus that he delivers himself up to the revenge of the model, and hence too why the apparently cold external perspective of the scanner is really a false perspective. The theatrical compulsion to transfer truth wholesale into an instrumental object means nothing insofar as it is not observed, since this operation is finally semantic, and accordingly extimate.

Burroughs made this point succintly: junkies may not like each other, but they need each other to score. There is a sting in the tail here: in fact, junkies do not only need each other simply to score, but more radically, they need each other in order to validate the basic foundational fantasy that forms the sacred heart of addiction itself: that scoring really is possible.

In other words, junkies need each other in order to materially maintain, in themselves, the evidence for the collective hallucination that is the Big Other. It is a desperate question of saving society, one hit at a time.

The addict, with his performance - by virtue of it, in respect to it - dreams of plugging directly into the real of an organic socio-historical wound, and becoming accordingly a kind of modern saint. In an attempt such as this, the exterior gaze is always-already caught-up in the terms of the more or less scandalized gallery sincerely performed for. It does not really matter if this gaze is unfriendly, just so long as it records every detail, and furthermore learns from these details. It is a kind of fetishist pedagogy.



The addictive aspect of drugs resides in this figure: the idea that there could really be something so attentive. This point seems to elude k-punk when he writes:

Both the novel and the film [of A Scanner Darkly] are remarkable, in fact, for their unstinting desublimation of drugs. The most censorious anti-drug campaigner could not have portrayed them more negatively... Dick and Linklater’s unblinking scanners (as unforgiving as a reality TV camera) record the vices of the habitual drug-user - unreliability, tedious self-involvement, a seemingly infinite capacity to squander time and resources - from outside.

What is missing here is the point that this supposed outside is really already the inside. It is the very fact that the scanners are unforgiving - and therefore supposedly truthful - which works to drive addicts into their blank, cozy, unremitting embrace. It is not that addicts - the contemporary avatars of fetishistic disavowal par excellance - somehow do not realize the utter abjection that radical addiction ultimately involves: the point is rather that they know this perfectly well - and this is precisely why they are doing it!



The rhetoric of pure negativity is therefore not a desublimation at all, but rather the most sublime lure of drugs. The failure to realize this point is most clearly expressed in supposedly harrowing ciné réaliste anti-drug heroin pictures such as Christiane F. The basic falsity in films such as these turns on a loaded axis of smug patronization, in which the wise and noble director simply fails to realize the fact that his heroic, forensic demystification of addiction really does not constitute a subversion of addiction at all, but rather precisely represents the subjective truth-procedure of the addict themselves - in other words, amounts to exactly the reason why the addict, when they grew up, became an addict in the first place.

Tom of BadZero notes:

Christiane speaks from beyond the grave, over an image of the countryside in winter. At the end of Christiane F we see her in a toilet cubicle injecting herself for the last time before her head slides down the tiles and out of frame. The scene fades and reopens over snow-covered fields. The recovery is moving because it comes out of nowhere and is in no sense already implicit in the events we have seen or the psychology of the characters. It's a sort of millennial redemption fantasy, moving because we know in real life, as presented on screen, it could never have happened. What is more moving than a beautiful untruth?

This is no redemption: this is addiction itself. Tom records the howlings, with the truth beneath the breath: "I survived. Mum took me to my Gran and Auntie in a village near Hamburg." Christiane did not survive. "I've been clean for 18 months." Christiane has been taking for 18 months. "It frightens me to think of Detlev. I often think of him. I'd like to give him some of my strength, and help him. But first I need the strength myself." It excites Christiane to think of Detlev. She seldom thinks of him. She would like to share some of her drugs with him, and fuck him up. But first she needs the drugs to fuck up herself. All of this in the spirit of ecstasy, and love without mercy.

Christiane speaks from the beyond the grave: in other words, she speaks as death-drive, which is how addicts talk. "There is a complete break between the film and its coda, " notes Tom acutely, but this break really is already inside the film, between the transcendent model and the squalid tedious series - and furthermore, really already inside the model itself. The religious parallel remains stunningly apt: Christ, this filthy idiot, who happens also to be God.

Substance D ex cathedro - the same substance exactly as Can-D, Chew-Z, Ubik and the anochi mushroom, this entire panopoly of active agents strewn throughout the work of Dick, each distinctly testifying in their different ways to the concrete universal of intoxication. Expression caught in the throat of technology, the last splash of the sacred in our narcotic modernity.

It is really the point initially made by Marx, and later taken up by Lacan: les non-dupes errent. It is not that the commodity is really just a commodity, which only the mystified believe to be magical. It is rather that the commodity really is magical, at least in appearance, and to fail to account for this fact means to fatally misunderstand it. In the tracks of this insight, it is clear that the drug - which explicitly claims to connect mind to reality, and thus asks for debunking most insistently of all - finally must be said to represent the supreme commodity, divinely shimmering transcendent light, seemingly criminally cast amongst mere dimensional things. It represents the essential ideological model of our consumerist post-society, much more so than money, and in another way too, really is like a contemporary Christ - this absolute object banally crucified between thieves, again and again, and moreover for identical reasons: to execute the Big Other - at any price.

Your finger on my pulse, my finger on your lips

Every age gets the psychic plague it deserves. It is an ecstatic matter of inherent trangression. In the hook of a deadlock, the subversion of power invisibly changes into spiritual labour. Pleasure falls back upon a painful reality principle, and the sublimation of suffering turns into a superficial, depraved and disgusting desire.



The matter is historical.

In the late nineteenth century, the enclosed spaces of the European societies of discipline made themselves prey to pervasive claustrophobic anxiety. Foucault analyzed the conditions of this logic in his genealogical works, but recognized as well that it was already passing away. Today, we are privileged to inhabit speed-of-light societies of control, and the neurotic revolt runs accordingly in the other direction. In the mediamatic age of the instant, the sick have become inexorably those who reject orbital space and flee back towards the earth.



It is not a dream of pure isolation. It is rather a broken body which sings.

The heart gets caught in the mouth, teeth in the veins, the light in the lack, and the sad ghost of the age becomes a machine. It twists into inorganic life, connects to the hypermaternal breast, and starts rewriting a series of spectacular metaphysical wagers.

In the first place: distinguishing surface from depth. In the second place: sealing off depth and making it sacred. In the third place: sculpting out of sensitive skin an interrogative transcendent eye to watch over the depths. In the fourth place: transferring to the commanding discretion of this extimate vision the terrorist Kantian power of an indifferent God. In the fifth place: forgetting completely the entire process. It truly is a cool operation.

The subject is now surrounded by the symbolic utterly, reminiscing profoundly about his time in the womb. He kills the daylight, turns the radio on, and begins to turn tricks for his own private audience. It is quite a show; this hideous parodic strip-tease. To the greasy coloratura of Pierrot lunaire successive layers of lack are torn in turn from the flesh of an organized body until nothing is left but perfect evil clean bones.



What progeny is now to be predicted?

In his masterpiece Hamletmachine, Heiner Mueller presented a brilliant vision of the pure control subject at the terminal stage: “I am not Hamlet. I play no role anymore. My words have nothing more to say to me. My thoughts suck the blood of images. My drama is cancelled. Behind me the scenery is being taken down. By people who are not interested in my drama, for people, to whom it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to me either. I’m not playing along anymore.”

The narcissism contained in this statement like the birdman of paradise still hugging his knees. The patient has long-since died on the table, but the internal bomb still somehow remains undefused. The studio audience went home three hours earlier, to drink insouciant Chilean wine with nonchalant wives. In the absence of action, menacing laughter just grimly rings out regardless as, strung out in a BokLok somewhere, Hemingway carefully positions the shotgun inside his mouth...



It is really a ruse.

A subject truly serious about subjective destitution possesses neither the need to express that fact, nor the agency to record it. It amounts to an act undertaken coldly and silently, an act moreover which works by undertaking the subject, and not vice-versa. It is structurally impossible for someone to simply and willfully decide to commit subjective destitution; the logic is rather that subjective destitution itself moves to commit the subject, and moreover to an awful decision always-already made.