(no subject)
So, on a recommendation from degram I read The Ethical Slut last night in an attempt to get more of a handle on this whole multivalence of sexual behavior thing that's been bugging me lately, and the whole time i couldn't shake the feeling that I'd heard of this book somewhere before. It was published to recently for it to have been something from Foucault, and in anycase, it's far too plainly a result of MF's History of Sexuality to have been cited as a source in that. On a hunch, I flipped to the citation index in my old, dogeared copy of Borgnine's The Poetics of Aggravated Sexual Assault and found the following passage in the Preface to the Second Edition, which shed some light on the whole issue of where I'd heard about the book before, although on the multivalence of the human sexual impulse, i have to confess, I'm still not sure what to think.
Oh, and according to Borgnine in his out of print Antisymposia, which i found a used copy of at Elliot Bay Book Company last night, male dolphin's have been observed gang raping female dolphins in the wild.
Perry Farrell was right. We will make great pets.
From The Poetics of Aggravated Sexual Assault: Rape, Sexual Mutilation, and Ritualized Sex/Murder as the Last Art of the 20th Century:
In the latter part of the twentieth century, the grammar of human interaction broke down. Grammar as thing-in-itself is inherently arbitrary. In practice, however, grammar is the most pragmatic of human concerns. It is flexible and organic and will spring to life in the most uncommon of situations provided that there is established at an early age the correct architecture for it in a person's mind. I have every confidence that were I stranded on an island with a native speaker of only one language, which I myself had no familiarity with whatsoever, the two of us would be able to construct a shared grammar that over time would allow us to communicate with one another about increasingly complex and complicated tasks. Or at least I should have that confidence because it seems a natural way of behaving...
and
The problem of sexual assault then, is the problem not of an absence of syntax, but of a willful neutering of it. No one can say that a rapist has failed to get his point across...
and
In many ways, what it means to get to know a person is not so much coming to understand their thoughts and feelings, their hopes and fears and desires. This is a ridiculous romantic notion that the preceding should with little fanfare have dispatched with completely. No to get to know someone is to create with them a body syntax. Establishing how one's body is to relate to another's, and the rules by which two bodies are to interact. In most cases, this takes time and energy and is largely the result of trial and error played out in neutral arenas. Like the tango, where two partners play against eachother continuously in a constant sexual advance and struggle for dominance, our social lives are elaborate unchoreographed dodges, feints, and lunges at one another in order to build and develop the body syntax.
In Wittgensteinian terms, this might be seen as a continual meta-language-game whose only rule is that we must constantly relearn and revise the rules. The beauty of sexual assault is found in it's violent and forthright short-circuiting of the arbitrary daintiness of the game. The rapist defines the subject body as object and remakes himself the objects ultimate predicate. The rapist qua predicate circumscribes the subject-body object and, absent of any other grammar save that contained by the rapists own primacy of desire, forcefully modifies the subject-body sententially in whatever manner most serves his lust. The rapist establishes and enforces a new and undeniable anti-body syntax upon his subject, who, when the rapist is successful, without other external recourse as is found in the legal systems of modern civilization, has no other option but to adhere to the strict and brutal efficiency of nonconsensual sex on the terms of a single unassailable other. The truth of this can be found built into the very fabric of consensual sex in the collective non-resistance to our sacred notion that there is a single grammar for sexual behavior; that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to behave sexually. The tyranny of this belief is illustrated not just in the championing of monogamy by rightwing idealogues and left wing pop culturists alike, but also in the alternate grammars such as the one proposed by Easton and Liszt in The Ethical Slut's equally specious argument in favor of polyamory.
On the contrary, the body syntax of daily life brooks no norms. It is not a place wherein we can find an eternal platonic form of love or fidelity or even simple, unadulterated lust. The body syntax of daily life is essentially nonessential. It is bereft of semantic content and imbued only with the perfervid insistence of our own animalism. The body syntax of daily life, in it's purest practice, does not care for emotional or physical consequences and while it is therefore impossible to find in it normative standards, I for one find it nearly impossible not to applaud the pursuit of a purer and more aggressively honest body syntax and the denial of the passivity of consent as the only worthwhile goal left.
The poetics of aggravated sexual assault are the only means we, as free thinking and free acting agents to resist the tyranny of consent. Or at least, the only way we can do so without landing ourselves behind bars...convicted of sex crimes on behalf of the a conventional wisdom which recquires nothing so much as the subjugation to the notion of consent.
Oh, and according to Borgnine in his out of print Antisymposia, which i found a used copy of at Elliot Bay Book Company last night, male dolphin's have been observed gang raping female dolphins in the wild.
Perry Farrell was right. We will make great pets.
From The Poetics of Aggravated Sexual Assault: Rape, Sexual Mutilation, and Ritualized Sex/Murder as the Last Art of the 20th Century:
In the latter part of the twentieth century, the grammar of human interaction broke down. Grammar as thing-in-itself is inherently arbitrary. In practice, however, grammar is the most pragmatic of human concerns. It is flexible and organic and will spring to life in the most uncommon of situations provided that there is established at an early age the correct architecture for it in a person's mind. I have every confidence that were I stranded on an island with a native speaker of only one language, which I myself had no familiarity with whatsoever, the two of us would be able to construct a shared grammar that over time would allow us to communicate with one another about increasingly complex and complicated tasks. Or at least I should have that confidence because it seems a natural way of behaving...
and
The problem of sexual assault then, is the problem not of an absence of syntax, but of a willful neutering of it. No one can say that a rapist has failed to get his point across...
and
In many ways, what it means to get to know a person is not so much coming to understand their thoughts and feelings, their hopes and fears and desires. This is a ridiculous romantic notion that the preceding should with little fanfare have dispatched with completely. No to get to know someone is to create with them a body syntax. Establishing how one's body is to relate to another's, and the rules by which two bodies are to interact. In most cases, this takes time and energy and is largely the result of trial and error played out in neutral arenas. Like the tango, where two partners play against eachother continuously in a constant sexual advance and struggle for dominance, our social lives are elaborate unchoreographed dodges, feints, and lunges at one another in order to build and develop the body syntax.
In Wittgensteinian terms, this might be seen as a continual meta-language-game whose only rule is that we must constantly relearn and revise the rules. The beauty of sexual assault is found in it's violent and forthright short-circuiting of the arbitrary daintiness of the game. The rapist defines the subject body as object and remakes himself the objects ultimate predicate. The rapist qua predicate circumscribes the subject-body object and, absent of any other grammar save that contained by the rapists own primacy of desire, forcefully modifies the subject-body sententially in whatever manner most serves his lust. The rapist establishes and enforces a new and undeniable anti-body syntax upon his subject, who, when the rapist is successful, without other external recourse as is found in the legal systems of modern civilization, has no other option but to adhere to the strict and brutal efficiency of nonconsensual sex on the terms of a single unassailable other. The truth of this can be found built into the very fabric of consensual sex in the collective non-resistance to our sacred notion that there is a single grammar for sexual behavior; that there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to behave sexually. The tyranny of this belief is illustrated not just in the championing of monogamy by rightwing idealogues and left wing pop culturists alike, but also in the alternate grammars such as the one proposed by Easton and Liszt in The Ethical Slut's equally specious argument in favor of polyamory.
On the contrary, the body syntax of daily life brooks no norms. It is not a place wherein we can find an eternal platonic form of love or fidelity or even simple, unadulterated lust. The body syntax of daily life is essentially nonessential. It is bereft of semantic content and imbued only with the perfervid insistence of our own animalism. The body syntax of daily life, in it's purest practice, does not care for emotional or physical consequences and while it is therefore impossible to find in it normative standards, I for one find it nearly impossible not to applaud the pursuit of a purer and more aggressively honest body syntax and the denial of the passivity of consent as the only worthwhile goal left.
The poetics of aggravated sexual assault are the only means we, as free thinking and free acting agents to resist the tyranny of consent. Or at least, the only way we can do so without landing ourselves behind bars...convicted of sex crimes on behalf of the a conventional wisdom which recquires nothing so much as the subjugation to the notion of consent.