Flatline_Constructs 2.12 Beyond the Pleasures of the Organs

A central pre-occupation The Atrocity Exhibition, as with Videodrome and Crash, is the displacement of bio-sexuality. The novel performs a decoding of sex into a matter of stimuli that are not themselves sexual: what Burroughs, in his preface, calls the “non-sexual roots of sexuality”. “sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act” (AE 60) Writing of Crash, Baudrillard invokes deterritorialized and disorganicized eroticism; a cyberotics. This is not a matter of simply substituting technical machines for biological sexual objects, but of decoding sexuality into a matter of abstract stimulus (one of Burroughs’ favourite themes, and one Ballard pursues relentlessly). Ballard’s question “in what way is intercourse per vagina more stimulating than with this ashtray, say, or with the angle between two walls?” (AE 69) outlines a vector of capitalist expansion. It’s not just a question of selling commodities by associating them with sex, (the well-known but by now archaic advertising technique critiqued by McLuhan in The Mechanical Bride) but of a generalized libidinization in which bio-sex is no longer the privileged referent. What McLuhan calls the “hunger to experience everything sexually” converts into an (even more) abstract drive to maximize sensation. Which also amounts, in The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, to the abstraction of sensation. Hence, for Baudrillard, the emergence of a generalized libidinization proper to the Body without Organs. As Baudrillard writes, in an almost valedictory mode: “Goodbye ‘erogenous zones’: everything becomes a hole to offer itself up to the discharge reflex. [...] Body and technology diffracting their bewildered signs through each other. Carnal abstraction and design.” (SS 112)[197]

In Ballard, as in Videodrome, eroticization is inseparable from mediatization and from landscape: all three form a continuum.[198] As we’ve seen, the schizophrenic implosion of subjectivity has as its other side the emergence of a hyper-body which moves beyond Worringer’s “wisdom and limits of the organism.” As body image (and organismic integrity) fade, new desires emerge. One could theorize these either as a hypersexuality - a sexuality that has escaped genital, even biotic reference, or as a post- or anti-sexuality - desires that it no longer makes any sense to describe in sexual terms. [199] Videodrome’s dominant image - of Max’s body transformed into a violently libidinized New Flesh - would support both theses. That image has presided over this chapter, and it will also preside over the next, which takes up again the question of the deterritorialization of sexuality. The next chapter, though, will be concerned less with the erotic, and more with the reproductive, role of sexuality, and the way it has been displaced by cybernetic systems. How do bodies without (sexual) organs replicate themselves?

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[197] Baudrillard’s emphasis, unlike ours, is on signs/ semiurgy. Witness the section excised from this quote: “But above all (as in primitive initiation tortures, which are not ours), the whole body becomes a sign to offer itself to the exchange of bodily signs.” Note again the neo-primitivism.

[198] A precursor here - often cited by Deleuze, and a key player in the “Body without Organs” plateau of A Thousand Plateaus - is Masoch. As Deleuze-Guattari make clear, masochism has nothing to do with the hunger for pain (which would merely be the complement of the hedonistic hunt for pleasure - see next footnote); it is concerned rather with intensity modulation. (See TP 155) This is effectuated by an eroticism which focuses as much on the mis-en-scene - the mistress’s clothes, for instance - as on the specifically “sexual” as such.

[199] In any case, it is no longer a matter of hedonism or pleasure (models Deleuze-Guattari strenuously oppose in A Thousand Plateaus, since they presuppose an organismic metrics, a hydraulics in which pressure builds up towards inevitable discharge; the plateau, meanwhile, is defined by its avoidance of a discharge which would terminate it.) (See TP 154, and its attack on the “priestly” account of “pleasure as discharge.”