2
America if nothing else is an ideological construct. But so is sex, and so
especially is orgasm.
3
The value is on change, and the rapidity of it. Burn your bridges. Don't
look back. This doesn't change the way it worked for millennia but a kind
of hyper-change, or high-speed motion that moves us out of a Newtonian
sociality into chaos. Orgasm then becomes a strange attractor.
4
As such attractors, orgasms undo all this. They are a mode of resistance,
if viewed in these admittedly fake political terms. This is the old boring
tale of subversion of desire. Romanticism, really.
5
Orgasms happen in bed (usually) just as naming happens in print or through
an electronic medium (usually). Or in the streets through spontaneous
linguistic intervention. What I am calling naming as a language function
always is embedded. We go to bed for very few purposes: to sleep, to dream,
to make love, to give birth, to be ill, and to die.
6
Who am I? I am my own judge and priest and analyst. The archon of orgasms.
7
How can a person have an orgasm if there is no person, no identity, no
self, no internal structural orientation? What would be the site or locus
of the orgasm? The body? Whose body? Is my body the same as your body? What
is a body?
8
Orgasm is a word. Orgasms don't happen in language. You get out what you
put in. That's the first rule for orgasm.
9
It is precisely a question of fields, and a model based on fields, since
rows or lines or stacks drag in the deep chronology of terminally ill,
reified history. America is a pure idea, specifically the ideology of the
late sublime, a carefully constructed mechanism for reprocessing human
reality along the fixed coordinate axes of power and desire. To achieve
this redoubtable feat, a charge of death must be imported, which is the
covert mission of the sublime. By late sublime I mean the conjunction in
the multimedia age of classical powerlessness in the face of a
monumentalizing other as passed through and therefore structurally reshaped
by our collective circuitboards and telephone lines and satellite uplinks
and downlinks. This death bonds instantly like molecules in valence to the
death congealed in the photographic image, opening a channel for
pornography and orgasms in America.
10
There is the prestigious screaming orgasm, which sounds so much like the
screaming of someone confronted with his or her own imminent death.
11
Screaming and coming are not one and the same, although they may happen at
the same time. Similarly, the mistaking of word for thing is all but
inevitable in a time when we accept as dogma that they are spread out on a
single continuum of signs. We have only the evidence of our senses as a
road to the inner kingdom, so it's understandable if we usually confuse
what we hear with something else about which we know very little, or
nothing of any real value.
12
Complementing the field is the space of orgasm, which codes against America
as space. It is the cruelty of an inhuman space, a dehumanized purely
physicalist approach. We are in the space of orgasm, in which a new freedom
can be manifest, a temporary openness to energies we had forgotten were
ours. This forgetting, of course, is not random but accompanies state
formation and state perpetuation. Legislators hate sex. America as a
political ideologeme hates sex.
13
For some, orgasm means death, the death of the ego, the blotting out of
one's sense of individuality or separateness from others in the social
world, the reinforcement of the status quo. Since this blotting out feels
good and is temporary, it guarantees the pursuit of further, better
orgasms, the furthest, best being that which physically kills you. Death in
orgasm. Death through orgasm. An orgasmic death. Instead, what we have in
America is death in a state which is the opposite or converse of orgasm, a state
of extreme agony, of exacerbated
selfhood at war with a hostile universe that is extirpating one piecemeal
as a way of torture. Death, torture, sex, and orgasm. Like grisly monsters
on a nightmare carousel they spin around and around, dizzying Americans
with their fascinating, horrible, shellacked visages.
14
Guilt and orgasm go hand in hand in America. Guilt also guarantees the
cycle, undergirds the repetition compulsion which seeks to flee guilt
through that which causes it. If we cannot control the pain levels mediated
through our bodies, then we can control the guilt levels by toggling back
and forth between pleasure and stasis. When the system falls off the track,
we have S & M. Pleasure and pain are interchangeable, but not guilt, which
transcends both, or infuses both with their raison d'etre.
15
Movies, videos, magazines, television, stars, sports, politics, Hollywood,
the aristocracy, National Enquirer, best sellers, fame, glamour, vacations
in the south of France, breakfast at the Russian Tea Room, Vail, designer
dining, Broadway musicals, the Museum of Modern Art, Paris the expensive
looking cheeks of the First World heated to a hectic glow by orgasm. Note
how so much of this depends on visuality, in spite of the complex roles of
touch, smell, and hearing in orgasm. "New orgasm" depends heavily on the
image track.
16
As creatures poisoned by language, orgasm fries the language synapses and
returns us to our sub-human, pre-language, back-brain animality, which we
experience as a pleasure so overwhelming it leads to a kind of blackout. We
experience not having to symbolize as a nothingness. It's no wonder
religious or spiritual terminology has been subsequently invoked in the
pitiful attempt to describe that which flattens description. The
sublimation of an animal experience makes it available as cultural capital,
to be stored, to replicate, to generate new energy out of itself, to give
rise to a superstructure called history, then to pass into that history in
an apotheosis which gloriously conceals its origins.
17
Orgasm is a way of canceling the evils of the world, of nullifying the
energy toxins deposited in the biosphere. In utopia, orgasm would not
exist.
18
What is not arbitrary or reasonable, of course, is the chain-link of
orgasms, those eminently memorable moments which seem to subsume the days
or weeks before and after in a golden haze of feeling.
19
Now the genders have melted down into a volcanic flow, accompanying the
disappearance of the family as a socializing unit which is being replaced
by the micro-nodes of consumer capitalism as reproduced through
advertising. Guilt is triggered if you don't consume. The incest taboo has
all but disappeared, and sexual desire (or what remains of it) runs rampant
through the streets and alleyways. The very concept of pornography has
become an atavism the discussion of which belongs in the classroom or the
sociology textbook. Orgasm, then, must have a brand-new social function. To
understand America even on this comically physicalist level, one must
become self-reflexive and articulate a theory of knowledge, an entire
psychology of cognition, memory, imagination. Central to the theory are
one's personal experiences, the nascent potential narratives of one's
buried, dead emotions, the memory of one's orgasms, whatever they may have
been.
20
This is a dream, the dream of the infinitely extended orgasm propounded by
Islam as a metaphor for paradise. Like all such dreams, it is based on a
division, a kind of exclusion or wall between, which separates a unity into
two parts that are then pitted against each other. Here it is the division
between body and mind, each phase of which wants to absorb and blot out the
other. In my dream I envision America, but the language is an irrational
one in which the references don't "come together," leaving me puzzled,
frustrated, wondering what is going on. Traveling is the worst possible
metaphor for orgasms. That is why it is so good.
21
There is nowhere to go but backwards. America is stuck in infancy and can't get
beyond the sucking stage. It wants what
it wants, and it wants it right now. Space or locale has become completely
immaterial, dematerialized. We are all flying backwards into the future,
whipsawed by destructive forces generated by our outrage of the landscape.
Welcome to the wonderful world of orgasm, which allows us to imagine we
have not left (and then returned to) that original state of orality and
undifferentiated bliss. If America is an infant, what happened to the
mother and father?
22
All the while, you follow along the line of the road which mimics and
throws back the line of words by means of which you alienate yourself from
any chance of pre-Oedipal orgasmic bliss. You find yourself trapped in
language, bound to the road. Space, motion, and orgasm are the magnetically
coded, mechanically interlinked keys to America, but if you are able to
unlock and open the door, what you find behind it will surprise you.
23
America loves sex, and especially orgasms, wants to rush past the foreplay
right into the hot spot. It loves sex especially since it alone understands
the inner meaning of the experience. By understand, I mean essentialize.
Ironically, America seems to have totally essentialized sex, but this is
only the obverse optical illusion with which it cloaks what it cannot
destroy through a process of rendering everything abstract, through a
knowing submission to the cogwheels of its progressive high-tech
methodology. After all, how else did this place as a material image of the
future come about?
