Electoral Ejaculations

Because sex and power are inextricably, irrevocably enmeshed in one another, it seems entirely relevant to talk about what we can learn about one from the other.  Specifically, the impulse to make rules for sex and seduction betrays a broader wish to impose order on the inherently disordered.  This is why nerds don’t get laid and the left is full of boring cultural imperialists.

People are always aghast when I harp on the virtues of Mystery and VH1’s The Pick-Up Artist, but I loved it because it was performative in the extreme.  Nothing was real, nothing was natural.  The success of a “pick-up artist” depended on whether or not he believed his own system; did they believe their “target” was genuinely stupid enough to be manipulated, or was it done with the inside wink which would affirm the absurdity of such an approach in earnest?  Does it allow for total agency or seek to subjugate it?  Herein lies the line between a lecherous creep and a dude who gets his dick wet wearing a giant fuzzy tophat.

Similarly, the same line can be drawn between the permanently outraged dinosaurs of the left, and those who will be relevant operatives of change.  Glory, glory, the limp (metaphorical) dicks of New Age sensitivity might be finally wussing itself into extinction.  Or will soon, anyhow.

I had a playful argument a few years ago with a dude over who had “pulled” whom.  The way I saw it, I had understood every subtlety being exchanged, and either yielded according to the script or playfully resisted in moments as a means of creating tension; ultimately, I felt it was my willingness to play the “damsel” which had allowed the whole exchange in the first place.  He, unsurprisingly, disagreed.  He cast himself as a sort of Dracula who had swept in and breached the boundaries of my propriety through sheer force of otherworldly charm.  The reality, of course, is that we played along with each other in a space that was both real and unreal, effortless in the way that a choreographed dance appears effortless, and yet for the two partners able to anticipate with near but not total certainty the next moves of the other, it is nothing but purely intuitive.  Lawlessness in the guise of law, the danger of possibility, the thrill of straying or being pulled from the script entirely.

The orgasm is the single best distillation of human experience we have: it is the “suicidal ecstasy” (as Leo Bersani calls it) of allowing the illusion of control to be wrestled from your grip; who might you say holds the power the moment two (or more) partners climax in concert?

Of course, there’s something patently unsexy about describing the insides of sex.  It is, and deserves to be, always hidden.  What I am really talking about is wilderness, a part of ourselves that (god willing) will always be untouched by measurement or mitigation.  As the artist Marilyn Minter, once maligned by feminist and mainstream critics for “reproducing” the “pornographic,” remarked in an interview, “[Sex] will spit in your eye; you cannot program it; you can’t make rules about it. It is very messy and very untidy.”

I have to wonder how much, if at all, our lives of fantasy have expanded in relation to the asymptotic climb charting the sheer volume and availability of information which permeates every day life.  Zizek notes how this hyper-awareness lends to a discomforting consciousness of the self, an eerily meaningless way of speaking about the same actions and impulses which “objectively” have hardly changed throughout human history:

The unfortunate result of this reflexivisation is that the analyst’s interpretation loses its symbolic efficacy and leaves the symptom intact in its idiotic jouissance. It’s as though a neo-Nazi skinhead, pressed to give reasons for his behaviour, started to talk like a social worker, sociologist or social psychologist, citing diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood…But the notion is undermined by the rise of what might be called ‘Post-Modern racism’, the surprising characteristic of which is its insensitivity to reflection – a neo-Nazi skinhead who beats up black people knows what he’s doing, but does it anyway.

Since the archaic systems of yore have been fully realized as not only violently marginalizing, but explicitly inadequate to describe the whole of our “material realities,” what seems to have most significance today is discussion of the imaginary, the implied, the untethered.  That is a truth which makes most of my friends claw at their faces in frustration (you little essentialists, you), but it’s neither a nihilistic nor masturbatory exercise, nor a system in and of itself.  Criticism and analysis of the imaginary has real and quantifiable consequences.

For instance, if within the first weeks of presidency, Obama does not dismantle Guantanamo, how do you think that might shape what he means to those who believed in him with unparalleled depth?  The implied gesture will resonate louder than the actual one; is this a president who is truly committed to the value of human life, or is this “another politician”?  Do we maintain faith in our hand in the political process, or do we begin the decline into even lower depths of despair than before?

The cynicism of the left that seems to be emerging post-election has been very telling of where, exactly, their greatest failures lie: the belief in achievement and the wish for stagnancy.  They want rules, structure.  There is none.  The future is pure possibility; that is to say, imagined.

The flat, dimensional reality of Obama as a man, whether he will make the structural ‘changes’ we want to see, whether he is sincere or a fraud, whether he will save us or usher in our disillusioned demise.  Judith Butler is wary of what she rightfully questions to be an “uncritical exuberance” on the left; similarly, an article on racewire scolds a self-congratulatory party for buying into their own empty message, and believing Obama is anything but an affirmation of a white supremacist nation.  As the issue of gay marriage and civil rights finds itself hotly in play after the passage of Prop 8, some radicals decry the endgoal of marriage as a satisfactory agenda for progressive politics because it “makes us forget that all forms of marriage perpetuate gender, racial and economic inequality.”

The arguments are not exactly incorrect (Butler’s least of all), but ill-focused.  My response to them, ultimately, is “So?”  So what were you expecting?  What are you asking for?  What do you imagine change to mean, and what do you hope to accomplish?  Is perfection possible?  These responses reflect what, exactly, it is to be a part of radical politics, and that is constantly in flux, constantly dissatisfied, constantly critiquing.  Always moving, moving, moving.  The margins necessarily must never conflate with the center, they must never rest.  You must always machete through the wilderness.  The concession of this explains why liberals have fun sex scandals like Eliot Spitzer and his hott DC hooker, while the religious right secretly bathe in their own self-loathing behind the sad, heavy drapery of an hourly motel room like Ted Haggard.  It’s like DeSade against Dimsdale—who do you think had more fun?  (Actually, bad example.  Hedonism makes everything so ho-hum, doesn’t it?)

The belief in an endpoint, like the belief in Obama as a messianic savior, is again the search for structure that doesn’t exist.  It is the hope that one might achieve peace and restfulness, no longer needed as a cultural warrior because there is a system or figurehead in place one can confidently default all responsibility to.  Unfortunately, this secret hope to be coddled makes for neither convincing activists nor lovers.  Says Zizek,

There is no seduction which cannot at some point be construed as intrusion or harassment because there will always be a point when one has to expose oneself and ‘make a pass’. But, of course, seduction doesn’t involve incorrect harassment throughout. When you make a pass, you expose yourself to the Other (the potential partner), and her reaction will determine whether what you just did was harassment or a successful act of seduction. There is no way to tell in advance what her response will be (which is why assertive women often despise ‘weak’ men, who fear to take the necessary risk). This holds even more in our pc times: the pc prohibitions are rules which, in one way or another, are to be violated in the seduction process. Isn’t the seducer’s art to accomplish the violation in such a way that, afterwards, by its acceptance, any suggestion of harassment has disappeared?

It is this unwavering attentiveness that is politically and sexually imperative in the successful lover (of the world or of the flesh, respectively).  Should you rest, should you for a single moment assume your mission has been accomplished and the two of you are as good as naked and fluid drenched, you will either find yourself alone or in the company of the court you’re about to defend yourself before, where you must explain that you mistook all the signals of rejection for those of consent.  Once you have violated the object of your affection’s boundaries, does it really matter if your intent was benevolent or malicious?

A successful seduction of the mainstream by radical politics is unrecognizable from its intended form; cultural criticism (harassment) held to the ideal is suddenly invited into the fold, but must still respond to the lines of consent drawn by the populist center.  You do not coerce, you finesse.  In this way, the progressive vision is better off understood as a process, not an upheaval; effectiveness is counter-intuitively a succession of failures.

To not appreciate the imaginary implications of Obama’s presidency or the issue of gay marriage as a matter of civil rights would be to miss the point.  In the case of Obama, he stands as a metaphor for personal agency and mobility, the ability to choose in a world where faith in that possibility had been eroded to the point of near-extinction.  In only 8 years, we had witnessed our the symbolic center reduced to pitiful molehills of smokey rubble, senseless punishment for unseen violations, 2 stolen elections, the collapse of all media outlets into two or three channels of hideous mediocrity, the blurring lines of the private and the public under reality television and myspace webcams and camera phones and unrestrained government surveillance, the discussion of government torture in public discourse slide from indignant denial to callous debates over the minutae of waterboarding, etc.  It’s not that these realities dissolve under an Obama presidency, it’s that we understand our place and responsibility within them and to each other as something closer, something less isolated.  The word “hope” suddenly has energy again in the mainstream, in the center.  That is invaluable. (I Cite has more on the value of this momentum.)

For gay marriage, it’s not that the institution of marriage isn’t problematic, but like all things, it must be approached as something which is salvageable rather than to be discarded, because to discard it is an impossibility, and an appeal to such would be to resign oneself to impotency.  Again it is the language, and thus the very concept existing in the imaginary realm, which must be shifted; to allow the church to maintain control over what defines marriage, whether civil unions function as a cognate or not, is constitutionally antithetical.  We must strive for a secular government in which the church has absolutely zero ecclesiastical authority over policy at any level.  “Seperate but equal” is hardly the end of it.  Anything other than supporting this inclusion is grossly inadequate and pithy when one considers that, as my friend Tiffiniy put it, “the end goal of this kind of push for gay marriage is ultimately not about marriage, which is as bad as [those arguments] say. it’s ultimately about being able to redefine something in a humanistic way.”

We are free, although we are not free and will never be.  “The trick performed by the superego is to seem to offer the child a free choice, when, as every child knows, he is not being given any choice at all.”  To exercise freedom is to critique its own non-existence.  To survive, to not crumble under exhaustion and defeat, there has to be a certain peace with that duality.  It does not fit into preexisting structures or rational thought, and must be allowed to exist outside of it.  Zizek again:

The perversion of the human libidinal economy is what follows from the prohibition of some pleasurable activity: not a life led in strict obedience to the law and deprived of all pleasure but a life in which exercising the law provides a pleasure of its own, a life in which performance of the ritual destined to keep illicit temptation at bay becomes the source of libidinal satisfaction.

The illusion, the imaginary, the untrue truths are all part of what needs to be considered when discussing ‘the real’ now.  We no longer have the luxury of dividing them for the sake of convenient speech.  Complexity cannot be ignored: feminists who get off on violent porn, a military with a homoerotic heirarchy, denouncing the naked back of teenage Miley Cirus while slipping a ring of chastity around your daughter’s finger as a vow to protect her sacred hymen.  It’s not even that we do the opposite of what we believe or secretly want, it’s that we genuinely desire, endorse, and subscribe to multiple truths at once.  To demand from that a fixed and readable schema is comically obscene and preciously antiquated.

Do these things (freedom, values, truth, love, justice) exist purely?  Who cares.  The unstable wilderness of political margins means you are constantly working towards an ideal you understand does not exist.  It is the imaginary that moves us forward and keeps us present, in life and in sex; we are working from the script of history, but we are not repeating it.  The thrill is in the deviations, in the unpredictable.  If you fear the risks essential to the territory, you are hardly living at all.