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2.1 Perversion across Discourse - The Regulated Body

According to psychoanalysis, acts of sexuality that are not specifically invested in the primary genital hetero-erotic aim are perverse. Perversion seems to fall into two categories. A ‘clinical’ category, where rigid rules are upheld in defining what is normal sexual behavior and what is perverse, (what Freud refers to in the prefix quote) and a social category which is more lenient in its restriction of sexual subjectivity, but which often includes sympathy for a pathological sexed body (for example, toward homosexuals because ‘they cannot help it’). The clinical definition of perversity is difficult, precisely because the clinical definition of normalized sexual behavior is so brief, and all else is a perversion. I include the following definition in the prelude because it is something I shall come back to. P.D. Scott states:

The elements of a comprehensive definition of sexual perversion should include sexual activity or fantasy directed towards orgasm other than genital intercourse with a willing partner of the opposite sex and of similar maturity, persistently recurrent, not merely a substitute for preferred behavior made difficult by the immediate environment and contrary to the generally accepted norm of sexual behavior in the community. [5]

This definition, which is expressed similarly in the majority of biomedical and psychological texts on perversion, categorizes potentials for perversion in multiple ways. To think perverse thoughts (sexual activity or phantasy) which are not normal thoughts with a hetero aim; to aim towards pleasure without entirely relying on a capital product i.e. orgasm; to have sex too much or not enough; or to prefer something else are all perversions. Before any object is inserted into the equation, one’s own body in pleasure, by itself, is perverse - this is, the state at which the body was left at the end of the pleasure section. Sexually, a body must be defined by an object, which acts as partner.  In Pleasure, I discussed the potential for splitting the subject from the self in acts which transform through pleasure, without specifying what kind of acts. But even if we take this most normalized of acts - the hetero, same-age, orgasm oriented act - we are still faced with the sexual splitting of self.

Georges Bataille, who does not specify sexual acts in ‘Sexual Plethora and Death,’ discusses the fragmentation of the sexual self in everything from single cell organisms to humans. Although Bataille sees this plethora as sacrificial and hence inextricable from a divine moral (and necessarily male) aim, the idea that through pleasure something is sacrificed is interesting. From a feminist perspective this does not hold such a threat: the loss of a whole, integrated subjectivity, is not possible for women who are not granted ‘wholeness’ of subjectivity as are male subjects. [6] From a cultural perspective it is not the entire being that is under threat of sacrifice, indeed it is the opposite of nihilism, simply an idea which includes some part of self being sacrificed - that something would be the subject who-I-was-before, or the idea of me-as-complete-organism. Bataille talks about the ‘feeling of self’ that accompanies being, but which is not consciousness, as “consciousness of self follows upon consciousness of external objects, only known in humanity.” [7] In sexual activity the internal self (‘feeling’ of self) and external objects are all externalized. Bataille states

Sexual activity is a critical moment in the isolation of the individual. We know it from without, but we know that it weakens and calls into question the feeling of self. We use the word crisis: that is, the inner effect of an event known objectively. As an objective fact of knowledge the crisis is none the less responsible for a basic inner phenomenon. [8]

This theory, though subversive to the integrity of subjectivity, is a nihilistic sacrificial one (concepts discussed most explicitly in ‘Death’). It has as its central focus the idea of ‘something to lose’ that reiterates the value of the subjectivity it annihilates. Knowledge of this loss is also seen as integral to its study. For my purpose, however, Bataille presents, through the most normalized and presumably towards the most perverse (whatever these all may be) of sexual acts, a crisis as the aim, a split in perception of the most fundamental plane of stratification, inside and outside (me). What Bataille may be suggesting occurring in this crisis is an effect within the inner feeling of self and outside the objective event. Affect-ed presumably would be what the subject comes away as. In sexual frenzy, we are outside the outside, and inside the inside, an ‘inner effect of an event known objectively’. In the most acceptable acts according to texts such as Scott’s, the dynamics of perception of the self are distorted and deranged, effecting a somewhat psychical or gestalt violence upon the integrated self-image. This idea of damaging the self, almost deliberately, leads to a concept prevalent in psychological and medical theories of perversion, which is the supposed intrinsic inclusion of aggression and hatred towards the perverse object choice within the drive.

In his book Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred Robert J. Stoller posits the argument that all perversion is borne of hatred towards the object choice, or what the object choice represents. By taking it as a sexual ‘partner’ the object which is hated is mastered in order to surpass a moment of trauma from the past. [9] So perverse object choices are symbols of trauma, and by sexually gratifying oneself with them, their power to harm the ‘pervert’ is curbed and, presumably, eventually vindicated. He states

In order to begin to judge these ideas, draw on your own experience. Think of perversions with which you are familiar... In each is found - in gross form or hidden but essential in fantasy - hostility, revenge, triumph, and a dehumanized object. Before even scratching the surface we can see that someone harming someone else is a main feature in most of these conditions. [10]

In comparing Stoller with Bataille we find a self who, more than an object involved, is dehumanized. Before annihilation of a human, dehumanization must ask the question ‘What is human’ and inevitably de-constructs the relationship between what is human and the subject. What is human is not opposed to what is not human but what is not a being at all, what is not an integrated object is placed in opposition to the human or a subject. Wholeness is implicit in what is human, and the crisis of transforming, shattering or changing subjectivity is adamantly indicative of something not whole and not one. For this reason dehumanization should not be taken in a derogatory context. The condition of being human, with the limits and boundaries of perception of self and object this entails, is negotiated so that the self can no longer look at itself and its partner and say ‘I am human’. Rather, at a loss for language, the self shifts towards a depth beneath the (or one) surface, with a different ‘feeling of self’ and hence, ‘feeling of object’. [11] Stoller quotes 1930s perversion theorist, E. Straus, “ ‘the delight in perversions is caused by... the destruction, humiliation, desecration, the deformation of the perverse individual himself and of his partner.’(Straus’s italics).” [12]

Stoller chooses this quote despite the tacking on at its end of ‘and of his partner’. The destruction of the self is more pertinent to my discussion though less so for Stoller. And Stoller says nothing of the italicizing by Straus of ‘deformation’ though it is a key element in relating the work of Bataille to this clinical theory. ‘Desecration’ and ‘humiliation’ are words that carry negative feeling, which are implicitly religious and juxtapose themselves favorably in Bataille’s work on transformation and death being essentially religious. But destroy and deform are ideal words used in order to become otherwise; here, to elucidate the ‘something different’ the sexually changing body is becoming. Human subjectivity in this sacrificial/desecrated mode implies the greatness of humanity and finished ‘manhood’ that is divinely given. I do not wish to sidetrack my argument by engaging in-depth with the religious importance of complete and integrated subjectivity. However, the pinnacle of iconography, (white, male) represents, visually and conceptually, the complete and ‘perfect’ human subject. [13] Juxtaposed against this image, all differing images are compared, as examples of what are not complete, what are not perfect and hence the beginnings of what is perverse. I would alter Straus’s idea slightly by stating that delight in all sexual activity, and all forms of pleasure, (perverse or not) rather than simply perversion, relates to their transformative affect. [14] If Freud defines pleasure in terms of a reduction of excitation, would practices that build up tensions by definition be perverse (as anti-pleasurable pleasures)? Does actively building up tension deform the self by launching it upon a trajectory of irreversible pleasures? Traditionally, however, reveling in one’s own de-formation and the de-formation of perspective (inside-inside/outside-outside), is easier to excavate when the object choice is markedly and identifiably different to the self and different from accepted majoritarian sexual practice. [15] Object is easier to study than affect, which is perhaps why perversity traditionally focuses on object rather than affect. Psychoanalysis, like many of the discursive genres analyzed in this book, follows equations. The most important quotient in the perverse equation is object. If the first quotient was instead affect, the act of sexuality, any sexuality, would no doubt constitute a perversion of the in-tact psychically ‘well’ self.

A further step from the perversion of the feeling of self which occurs during (among other things) sex, is the perversion of the subject. If self is who we feel we are, subject is who we think we are or the mode in which we perform and regulate our behavior based on our idea of whom we are. [16] While sexual activity is frequently private, especially interior changes within the feeling of self, our ‘out’ sexuality, something demanded of us, is spoken, public and phantasmatically fixed. Gender and sex seem at odds here. Gay more often than not presumes masculinity, anal sex presumes a penis, and paedophilia presumes action rather than phantasy. Along with who we are sexually, or what our object choice is, lies certain presumptions about the body these suggest we have, and the limits of our activities. [17] But most importantly, everything that does not fit with what is currently accepted (and Scott’s definition can be seen as the most restrictive version) is perverse - one term, not many specifics. What we find from clinical texts is that if unbound desire is privileged over maintaining the symbolic integrity of the subject, (implicit in this is choosing a good, subject-to-object conforming object choice) that subject is constructed as perverse. [18] The subject is seemingly safely intact if its object choice is correct. Lacan states “What defines perversion is precisely the way in which the subject is placed in it... the pervert is he who, in short circuit, more directly than any other, succeeds in his aim, by integrating in the most profound way his function as subject with his existence as desire.” [19] A subject of function rather than being, and a subject with open desire flow (existence as desire not with desire) rather than desire with lack which demands object choice, drives existence into a system of process rather than spatial positioning (a or the subject, available for clinicians as an object). Clinically however to indulge in perverse activities is to re-negotiate one’s power as a subject, to allow one’s subjectivity to become pathologized as something ‘other’ - the pervert. Desire for act or object, singly or multiply performed, strives further than, and is in excess of, the subject. By performing a perverse act, one’s subjectivity becomes only desire for that act, becomes the act itself. This is how perversity is constructed. But perversity is rampant in everyday activity: to watch too much, not to watch enough, to be voyeur to film, to be narcissistic of self. Psychoanalytic perversions conform and conflict with medical pathologization of perversity, ‘illnesses’ of sexual drive. Legality comes in when the perversity is simply too much for culture to stomach. Foucault says of the history of sexual prohibition and the construction of perversity that “acts ‘contrary to nature’ were stamped as especially abominable, but these were perceived simply as an extreme form of acts ‘against the law’.” [20] The ‘law’ is applicable right across epistemic fields - from the normative regulating of the self in assuring ‘healthy’ psychical subjectivity in psychoanalysis, to the mandatory state which levels health within the physio/patho-logic of medicine. The ‘law’ is an intervention from the outside when the subject can no longer regulate itself from the inside (therapy, drugs and so on).

The law of organisms, which in science is the claim to know objects through analysis of their a priori state of being is upset by affect concepts such as desire and pleasure because they are not so visible and hence epistemologically graspable. Science does not ignore these spheres when formulating the knowledges that constitute natural objects. Science often attempts to excavate somewhat amorphic areas of knowledge, such as desire, at more base levels than ‘the human’ in order to formulate an epistemology of ‘raw nature’, pure biology untouched by culture. This aim to formulate a biological knowledge of desire, utilizing a theory to elucidate the plasticity of bodies and their inextricable relation to desire at a bestial level, is discussed in the article ‘Biological factors in the organization and expression of sexual behavior’ by Richard P. Michael and Doris Zumpe. [21] The study, which refers to everything from single cell organisms to cats, monkeys and guinea-pigs, is performed in order to prove the essential mutability of ‘sex’ (sexual morphological characteristics, from male with male behavior, through effeminate male, ‘neutral’, masculine female to female with female behavior) and ‘sexuality’ (male sexual behavior in females; female sexual behavior in males; bisexual behavior in animals; with and without the intervention of hormones and/or androgens). Sexuality here is seen as the ‘natural’ version of what in humans would presumably be called desire or would be the vindication of the ‘nature/nurture’ debate in queer biological studies. Surprising results in Michael’s and Zumpe’s study include complete absence of sexuality in sexed bodies, and complete development of sexuality in bodies entirely void of any sex, both genitally and neurologically, (the hypothalamus, or ‘sex receptor’ in the brain [22] ) and void of any sensory organs at all. [23] What these kinds of studies could show is that even within the same species bodies, ‘sex’ (or gender depending how determined sex is believed to be in each study) and drive are completely unpredictable and limitless in their intersecting indices at any given moment. [24] Their problem lies in the demand for knowledge and predictable repetition within scientific studies that would posit these indices, no matter how many, as eventually finite. An infinite number of interventions, experiences and species (bodies) could produce results which diverge from each other. What such results conclude, however, is that whatever ‘perversion’ occurs in humans, the perversion has also been observed occurring in ‘nature’, (as opposed to culture, though a laboratory does not seem entirely ‘natural’). Hence, the behavior is locatable to a source in the flesh or the earliest experiences of the pervert, suggesting its potential eradication via medical or psychological intervention. Yet another equation is formed, though this one goes backwards. Perversion is the last quotient, and by figuring out the first quotients which add up to a particular perversion, science can explain the reason for the perversion, eradicate it (‘minus-ed’) and the perversion, hence the pervert, will no longer exist.

Act, and subject performing perversity, are relative in terms of their degrees of perversity. What matters are that they are all ‘other’, aberrant behaviors, to be controlled, studied, created understood... or prosecuted. Making aberrant an act, in relation to the object-choice involved in the act, creates a subject which springs from the act, the subject who now is that act. [25] But what perversion really offers is more-than-one subjectivities simultaneously (which present themselves in opposition to the singular subject). Foucault uses Don Juan as an example of a pathologized pervert:

Here we have a likely reason, among others, for the prestige of Don Juan, which three centuries have not erased. Underneath the great violator of the rules of marriage - stealer of wives, seducer of virgins, the shame of families, and an insult to husbands and fathers - another personage can be glimpsed: the individual driven, in spite of himself, by the somber madness of sex. Underneath the libertine, the pervert... We shall leave it to psychoanalysts to speculate whether he was homosexual, narcissistic or impotent. [26] (My italics)

Foucault’s point is not that Don Juan was a figure of sympathy for his ‘sexual illness’ but that his activity ruptured the order that stabilized and regulated sexual behavior in culture. Don Juan then acted ‘in spite of himself’; he spited the idea of a fixed and finished subjectivity. While rupturing social law he ruptured also the law of the predictable subject, both in the feudal and the psychoanalytic sense of the word. He obeyed neither the law nor his idea of his own subjectivity, so before the acts of his perversion occurred, a rupture or perversion of subjectivity occurred. It is impossible to say whether the actions of Don Juan were deliberate. The argument for agency in sexual behavior versus uncontrollable urge spurred on by underlying unconscious psychical drives is one that I do not wish to undertake. Sufficient to say that whatever caused it, (if it needs a cause, which it only does if the activity of the subject is read as a narrative or equation) the perversion of Don Juan perverted his subjectivity before it ‘acted out’ perverse activity. This happens every time a subject transforms (which it must continuously, with the attainment of new knowledges and experiences [27] ) so perversion as a term becomes applicable to any non-stagnating subject. [28]

Commonly, any phenomenon that engages with and affects the subject, which in turn changes and hence ‘perverts’ the subject to become something new, takes the word ‘pervert’ used as a noun and emphasizes instead its use as a verb. Janine Chassegeut-Smirgel states:

The noun has much in common with the law, considered as separation, division. It is a part of speech which names a person, place or thing, that is to say, which takes out of chaos and confusion and gives it definition. In fact, Genesis relates the story of Creation not merely as a time of separating and dividing, but - and in my opinion this comes to the same thing - one of naming. [29]

Along with our given names and family names are our profession names, color, race, gender and sexuality names. As Chassegeut-Smirgel points out, the law (which is as important a term in psychoanalysis as it is in the bible) relates directly to names. When our sexuality is in question, it is because during sex the division of ourselves from everything else is momentarily breached, a return to a form of ‘chaos and confusion’. This division could be due to the loss of language that occurs in moments of pleasure, and also the inability to articulate pleasure sufficiently with language. Compulsory same age, non-incestuous heterosexuality enforces our ‘separateness’, momentarily forfeited in sexual activity when our subjectivity is joined with something else (and theoretically for religion as well as for most other genres of text this will eventually produce a third quotient - offspring). The ‘something else’ must conform with the self in order to prevent any ‘perversion’ of the self after the act - in order to confirm reterritorialization. Hence, no matter what the deterritorializing affect of perversion, if reterritorialization is the aimed-for conclusion, perversion is not a line of flight but a reaffirmation of acceptable axes of society. Because pleasure deterritorializes us, alters us from the moment before, the object we choose to be involved with during that change (the object of desire, or of sexual or any other interaction) must assure our reterritorialization, some continuity to our being when, after the pleasure has ceased and we ‘return’ to our known version of self, it is able to reaffirm who we are. The object of desire must fit in with who we think we are in order that the re-appearance of the person we think we are can occur ‘after the change’. The result of whom or what the subject is after the act must be safely predictable in order to ensure the continuation of divided and proper appropriately named subjects. This theory ignores the change which sexual activity, or any self-losing language-defying activity, performs upon the body before, in spite of and no matter what the other (whether it be inanimate or one’s own self, as in masturbation) in the equation is. It also ignores the irreversible alteration that temporally occurs during all experience and hence claims a return backward in time. The object of a sexual union is seen as the vehicle for pleasure, which represses completely the body of the self during pleasure. Any limiting theory of perversion would continue within this schema by stating that a perverse object ensures perversion of the self. However, it is the perversion of subjectivity that occurs in the body during pleasure, or pain, or anything else that transforms, which is the most subversive element towards figuring a processual rather than fixed subject. The body-in-pleasure is repressed after the act, and the object choice is seen as the cause of pleasure. The cause of the pleasure is the body, is in the body and is experienced as the body. After a transformative affect has occurred, the object choice becomes stand-in for the body – ‘S/he caused me pleasure’ rather than ‘my body was/is pleasure’. So, even to utilize a perverse object choice as the only subversive element in a theorization of different bodies limits the presence of corporeality implicit in and extricable from immanent self.

The lifeline of humans is read, like many social and biological phenomena, in a narrative sense; the subject develops from infancy (no or unformed subjectivity) into adulthood (sexual and completed subjectivity) and then deteriorates at the winding down stage of aging subjectivity (imminently dissolving subjectivity). The subject could instead be read, not as one that develops, finishes and disappears, but as one that continually changes in order to exist, or ‘be’ in the world. This would refigure the idea of the perverted or perverting self, and induce the eradication of ‘I am being perverted’, the fear of one’s subjectivity becoming altered as an accusation of loss of self. The problem with this theory, however, is that the idea of the threat of the term pervert is not entirely within the self and its conflict with the ideal ‘I’, but rather as a sociologically comparative noun. One can only be a pervert when compared to that which is not a pervert. Like the term female, which, anaclitic to the term male cannot exist without it, among many other terms, the use of the term pervert is isomorphic to the dominant term ‘normalized’ or non-pervert. There is no world of all perverts. Normalized behavior is not what the subject in society must stay inside of; rather perverted behavior is that which is pushed outside of normal after it happens. No one law states what is and is not perverted in order to prevent perverted activity occurring, and perhaps prevent subjectivity from wandering into that other side of behavior. It is only after the un-predictable occurs that it can be named perverted. For this reason normal behavior in itself does not exist. Perverted behavior exists in order to create normal behavior. [30] Perversion, and hence any sense of the normal, share tense and fuzzy boundaries and are temporally and culturally contingent. Immobilizing their essence, even in one space at one time, depends importantly on who speaks and who is being spoken about.

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