Carlin and Keret on the Solar Anus
From "Aristocrat's Joke" in The Aristocrats (2005):
I shit in her mouth, it’s mostly liquid. It’s like a diarrheic thing. I try to include corn and things that will not break down in the digestive system. Peanuts, of course. I try to get a lot of solid objects so that there’s a little action too. It’s not just a stream of brown liquid. And it all goes into... I can hit her mouth pretty well. I do have one polyp - I have a large, kind of a hemorrhoidal polyp that sometimes throws my aim off and I have to... It’s kind of like Kentucky windage, but I usually get it. I can hear whether it’s hitting the hollow area of her throat.
From "Hemorrhoid" in Suddenly a Knock at the Door (2010):
This is the story of a man who suffered from a hemorrhoid. Not a lot of hemorrhoids. A single, solitary one. This hemorrhoid started out small and annoying, but very soon it became medium-sized and irritating, and in less than two months it became big and really painful. The man continued to live his life as usual: he worked long hours every day, took time off on weekends and fucked on the side whenever he had the chance. But this hemorrhoid, which was clinging to a vein, kept reminding him at every long meeting or painful BM that to live is to suffer, to live is to sweat, to live is an ache you can’t fucking forget . And so, before every important decision the man would listen to his hemorrhoid the way others listen to their conscience. And the hemorrhoid, like any hemorrhoid, would give the man some asshole advice. Advice on whom to fire, advice on aiming higher, advice to pick a fight and with whom he should conspire. And it worked. With every passing day, the man became more and more successful. The earnings of the company he headed kept growing, and so did the hemorrhoid. It reached a point where the hemorrhoid outgrew the man. And even then, it didn’t stop. Until eventually it was the hemorrhoid that was Chairman of the Board. And sometimes, when the hemorrhoid took its seat on the chair in the board room, it found the man underneath a little irritating.
This is the story of a hemorrhoid that suffered from a man. The hemorrhoid continued to live its life as usual: it worked long hours every day, took time off on weekends and fucked on the side whenever it had the chance. But this man, who was clinging to a vein, kept reminding him at every long meeting or painful BM that to live is to yearn, to live is to burn, to live is to fucking screw up and wait for fate to turn. And the hemorrhoid would listen to the man the way people listen to their stomach when it rumbles and asks for food - passively but acceptingly. And thanks to this man, the hemorrhoid tried to believe it could live and let live, it could learn to forgive. It could conquer its urge to look down on others. And even when it swore, it didn’t mention people’s mothers. And so, thanks to the irritating little man under him, everyone came to value the hemorrhoid: hemorrhoids, people, and of course, the company’s satisfied shareholders all around the world.
- end story
To deny the reality of our excess is to let our excess screw us over without the least resistance from us. To acknowledge the reality of our excess is to negotiate with our limits, which lets us value the hemorrhoid. We may even come to identify with our limits and so marginalize our selves, which would remove the egoism that prevents the mobilization of the dialectic of our social economy.
In a small way the avowal of our limits allows us to hit our mark even though we cannot see that at which we aim. Total satisfaction is still not possible, but a little extra satisfaction may be won if we listen to the limits which principle our actions. The avowal of our limits allows us to make some compensation for them, to put some spin on our reach so that we might not entirely miss our mark. So what limits of society might we affirm with which policies? How do we institute Kentucky windage in the social justice agenda? We have learned that society has a libidinal organization, or sexual principles/limits of social behavior. We also know that society reproduces itself through education in various forms. Thus we can infer that sex education is a privileged determinant of social organization. Further, we know from historical and clinical research that teachers want to have sex with students, but such sex has become taboo in our education system on account of the parental role of the educator - the desire for incest is repressed. Clinical research allows us to read the teacher’s compensation for this frustration; the teacher fucks with the students in ways principled by desire. The queer theory of ‘backdoor pedagogy’ - fucking with the students - is not new, but is newly aware of what teaching does in an educational system. Yet we still need to ask, how might an educational system, as opposed to a teacher, institute an avowal of the backdoor pedagogy which structures the student body?
If a teacher wants to fuck students, an education system wants to fuck humanity. Pedagogy and anthropology are figured through one another; the human and the student have been inseparably intersectional figures at least since Kant centralized Western educational theory around human reason - man is the only creature who needs education, and man only becomes man by education. Man becomes reason, nation, excellence... The immutable nature of man becomes itself through changes it brings upon itself. The excess of this logic indicates that we arealready in a mythical anthropology. Where is our special object here? If we have been relying on a binary between teachers and students, we can readily acknowledge that self-educators are our special, destabilizing object. Self-educators are both student and teacher. But our education systems have largely denied the existence of the self-educator as an excess of pedagogy, and so, by making the students carry the split of education, the student body is both revered and mutilated, fetishized. Thus our educational modernity consists in the increasing fetishization of educational labor - the expansion of adjunct teaching, of self-administration, and of reliance on students to supplement their formal education to cover over the educational institution’s lack of completeness. Does this practice have momentum to get beyond itself? Is there a way for an education system to avow its excess instead of displacing its feelings about excess onto the student body?
We can value the self-educator and identify with self-education by recognizing that the self of the self-educator is already grounded in its other. The public education system can avowedly fuck with humanity by regulating sex education around research in excess (historical and clinical), and tailoring the sex education curriculum to salient social justice issues. So works like Freud’s “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality” and Foucault’s History of Sexuality vol. 1-3 should inform sex education in general; and texts such as Samuel R. Delaney’s Times Square Red Times Square Blue should be taught because Delaney argues (based on psychoanalytic and historical research) that we should legalize sex hostels as a means of promoting inter-class contact and as a means of curbing sexualized street harassment. The psycho anal cyst must be loved, not preparation h-bombed.
I shit in her mouth, it’s mostly liquid. It’s like a diarrheic thing. I try to include corn and things that will not break down in the digestive system. Peanuts, of course. I try to get a lot of solid objects so that there’s a little action too. It’s not just a stream of brown liquid. And it all goes into... I can hit her mouth pretty well. I do have one polyp - I have a large, kind of a hemorrhoidal polyp that sometimes throws my aim off and I have to... It’s kind of like Kentucky windage, but I usually get it. I can hear whether it’s hitting the hollow area of her throat.
From "Hemorrhoid" in Suddenly a Knock at the Door (2010):
This is the story of a man who suffered from a hemorrhoid. Not a lot of hemorrhoids. A single, solitary one. This hemorrhoid started out small and annoying, but very soon it became medium-sized and irritating, and in less than two months it became big and really painful. The man continued to live his life as usual: he worked long hours every day, took time off on weekends and fucked on the side whenever he had the chance. But this hemorrhoid, which was clinging to a vein, kept reminding him at every long meeting or painful BM that to live is to suffer, to live is to sweat, to live is an ache you can’t fucking forget . And so, before every important decision the man would listen to his hemorrhoid the way others listen to their conscience. And the hemorrhoid, like any hemorrhoid, would give the man some asshole advice. Advice on whom to fire, advice on aiming higher, advice to pick a fight and with whom he should conspire. And it worked. With every passing day, the man became more and more successful. The earnings of the company he headed kept growing, and so did the hemorrhoid. It reached a point where the hemorrhoid outgrew the man. And even then, it didn’t stop. Until eventually it was the hemorrhoid that was Chairman of the Board. And sometimes, when the hemorrhoid took its seat on the chair in the board room, it found the man underneath a little irritating.
This is the story of a hemorrhoid that suffered from a man. The hemorrhoid continued to live its life as usual: it worked long hours every day, took time off on weekends and fucked on the side whenever it had the chance. But this man, who was clinging to a vein, kept reminding him at every long meeting or painful BM that to live is to yearn, to live is to burn, to live is to fucking screw up and wait for fate to turn. And the hemorrhoid would listen to the man the way people listen to their stomach when it rumbles and asks for food - passively but acceptingly. And thanks to this man, the hemorrhoid tried to believe it could live and let live, it could learn to forgive. It could conquer its urge to look down on others. And even when it swore, it didn’t mention people’s mothers. And so, thanks to the irritating little man under him, everyone came to value the hemorrhoid: hemorrhoids, people, and of course, the company’s satisfied shareholders all around the world.
- end story
To deny the reality of our excess is to let our excess screw us over without the least resistance from us. To acknowledge the reality of our excess is to negotiate with our limits, which lets us value the hemorrhoid. We may even come to identify with our limits and so marginalize our selves, which would remove the egoism that prevents the mobilization of the dialectic of our social economy.
In a small way the avowal of our limits allows us to hit our mark even though we cannot see that at which we aim. Total satisfaction is still not possible, but a little extra satisfaction may be won if we listen to the limits which principle our actions. The avowal of our limits allows us to make some compensation for them, to put some spin on our reach so that we might not entirely miss our mark. So what limits of society might we affirm with which policies? How do we institute Kentucky windage in the social justice agenda? We have learned that society has a libidinal organization, or sexual principles/limits of social behavior. We also know that society reproduces itself through education in various forms. Thus we can infer that sex education is a privileged determinant of social organization. Further, we know from historical and clinical research that teachers want to have sex with students, but such sex has become taboo in our education system on account of the parental role of the educator - the desire for incest is repressed. Clinical research allows us to read the teacher’s compensation for this frustration; the teacher fucks with the students in ways principled by desire. The queer theory of ‘backdoor pedagogy’ - fucking with the students - is not new, but is newly aware of what teaching does in an educational system. Yet we still need to ask, how might an educational system, as opposed to a teacher, institute an avowal of the backdoor pedagogy which structures the student body?
If a teacher wants to fuck students, an education system wants to fuck humanity. Pedagogy and anthropology are figured through one another; the human and the student have been inseparably intersectional figures at least since Kant centralized Western educational theory around human reason - man is the only creature who needs education, and man only becomes man by education. Man becomes reason, nation, excellence... The immutable nature of man becomes itself through changes it brings upon itself. The excess of this logic indicates that we arealready in a mythical anthropology. Where is our special object here? If we have been relying on a binary between teachers and students, we can readily acknowledge that self-educators are our special, destabilizing object. Self-educators are both student and teacher. But our education systems have largely denied the existence of the self-educator as an excess of pedagogy, and so, by making the students carry the split of education, the student body is both revered and mutilated, fetishized. Thus our educational modernity consists in the increasing fetishization of educational labor - the expansion of adjunct teaching, of self-administration, and of reliance on students to supplement their formal education to cover over the educational institution’s lack of completeness. Does this practice have momentum to get beyond itself? Is there a way for an education system to avow its excess instead of displacing its feelings about excess onto the student body?
We can value the self-educator and identify with self-education by recognizing that the self of the self-educator is already grounded in its other. The public education system can avowedly fuck with humanity by regulating sex education around research in excess (historical and clinical), and tailoring the sex education curriculum to salient social justice issues. So works like Freud’s “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality” and Foucault’s History of Sexuality vol. 1-3 should inform sex education in general; and texts such as Samuel R. Delaney’s Times Square Red Times Square Blue should be taught because Delaney argues (based on psychoanalytic and historical research) that we should legalize sex hostels as a means of promoting inter-class contact and as a means of curbing sexualized street harassment. The psycho anal cyst must be loved, not preparation h-bombed.