tobia:

““Forget the room of one’s own - write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or on the welfare line, on the job or during meals, between sleeping and waking. I write while sitting on the john. No long stretches at the typewriter unless you’re wealthy or have a patron - you may not even own a typewriter. While you wash the floor or clothes listen to the words chanting in your body. When you’re depressed, angry, hurt, when compassion and love possess you. When you cannot help but write.””

— Gloria Anzaldúa

(Source: moonmarkedandtouchedbysun)

If the drum is a woman
why are you pounding your drum into an insane
babble
why are you pistol whipping your drum at dawn
why are you shooting through the head of your drum
and making a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a woman
don’t abuse your drum don’t abuse your drum
don’t abuse your drum
I know the night is full of displaced persons
I see skins striped with flames
I know the ugly disposition of underpaid clerks they constantly menstruate through the eyes
I know bitterness embedded in flesh
the itching alone can drive you crazy
I know that this is America and chicken are coming home to roost
on the MX missile
But if the drum is a woman
why are you choking your drum
why are you raping your drum
why are you saying disrespectful things
to your mother drum your sister drum
your wife drum and your infant daughter drum
If the drum is a woman
then understand your drum
your drum is not docile
your drum is not invisible
your drum is not inferior to you
your drum is a woman
so don’t reject your drum don’t try to dominate your drum
don’t become weak and cold and desert your drum
don’t be forced into the position
as an oppressor of drums and make a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a woman
don’t abuse your drum don’t abuse your drum
don’t abuse our drum…….

Jayne Cortez

DESIRING SEDUCTION

[mark fisher & suzanne livingstone]

Five: What can a Female Body do?

All of this Baudrillard misses. Now, when a crass blatancy of specular male sex is proliferating across the screens of contemporary culture, Baudrillard’s lament that “the sexual has triumphed over seduction” (41) has a certain power. But having identified, in Symbolic Exchange and Death , the phallus as “general equivalent” for all specular representations of the body, (SymD 101-4) Baudrillard cannot see that to evade phallic tyranny would demand abandoning his empire of signs, the only level at which the phallus can ever achieve domination.

Continuity demands that Baudrillard recognise It has always been the Matrix - “nonstratified, unformed, intense matter … fusionability as infinite zero” (TP 153, 158) - yet he doesn’t want to know, even if sometimes he is drawn out here, positing, outside Seduction, an eroticism decoupled from reproductive sex, (SymD 158) and “a body without organs and the pleasures of organs” (SS 111). But in the end, he is always drawn back to the signs. Bataille, he complains, in Symbolic Exchange and Death, is “too biologistic” (SymD 158), just as Irigaray is censured, in Seduction, for supposedly reviving the Freudian formula, Anatomy is Destiny. (9)

But it is never a matter of that. Far from it: Destiny, the judgments of God, has traditionally decreed the somatization of the female body into idealist specularizations. In the end, it is Baudrillard whose neuromances depend upon a certain biologism, since even his semiotics are built upon a meiotic reproduction for which they simulate disdain. Irigaray’s delicate probings, meanwhile, make theory responsive to a body that is only just opening up.

It is rarely asked what a body can do. Even less has been inquired of the capabilities of an already rampant and stirred female body. It is almost too much to entertain the possibilities of cosmic activity within the five to seven days of an exposed menstrual cycle or of the unresolved sensations of a female Desire unconnected to the production of issue. But the ceremonial subsuming of Baudrillard beneath the flows of his own escaping system suggest that these questions can only be answered, not in theory alone, but in an experimental practice, a Cyberotics whose program is the transformation of unfeeling perceptual-conscious crust into sensitive sampling tissue.

Though he would be the last to recognise it, there is a Desire named Baudrillard; it is something a little like masochism in its fascination with pacts, rules, artificial constraints, in its recognition that “Pleasure is … something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the positive process” (TP 155): any way, it seeks out plateaus. Baudrillard himself articulated the pointlessness of assuming final causes, of games that, to the disappointment of the participants, would find an apparent end and need to be started again. The games he prefers go on forever and cannot be confined to chosen social bodies. Their resources and playing fields are non-localised and responsive to virtually any element which crosses their path. Such universal gaming makes impossible the explanation of social behaviour in terms functional or teleological. If means are taken to occur without a view to their ends then like any unfinished job, sex must be taken to occur without a view to reproduction. In Seduction, Baudrillard unleashed activities of which he may still remain unaware - open systems which never close, women who never reach his chosen ends, woman who will never await his lingering gaze. Preferring, instead, to stay in, switching themselves on, running auto-affection.

And when Irigaray invokes female-to-female Desire in “When our Lips Speak Together”, this cannot be simply dismissed as a call for female separatism. Rather, by defining Desire as the flatlands where the body with organ cannot go, she radically inverts the phallic stupidity of molar sexuality’s puzzled interrogation: “What do lesbians do?” This is not a matter of keeping men out, but of demanding of them that they become something else, that they lose the pleasure of the organ in order to find a Desire that can never belong to them, or to any One. essentialism which Baudrillard holds against Irigaray - as if woman could be isolatable as an abstract quality to which she must aspire and then maintain - with a wanting man following shortly behind.

Yet its practice is a continuous operation, never resolved, never frozen for long enough for such identifiable abstraction to take place. Irigaray’s woman, always the tactful mimic, is able to mobilise the female stereotype to the point where it may spin back in a white man face - to where it escapes the socius in which it presently functions in order to re-infiltrate, on an as yet uncharted trajectory via a non-identitarian zone of potential.

In a body in which a womb is free to wander, Desire need be committed to neither sex nor pleasure. She will instead invent a new erotics no longer confined to the bed or the marital home. Her supposed essential identity finds no place to reside in a body refusing definition by its form, its function or organs. It becomes an estranged object like any other piece of debris from a molar socius, detached from a body creative and productive, from a body both unfixed and unknown since it refuses to remain stable across time. The potential cannot be predicted because it is only partially observable amidst the ongoing interactions which occur between the body and the environment which constitutes it. The essentialist allegations against becoming woman are thus immediately allayed - for inherent to the Process is an absolute dependence on specific conditions. There is therefore no essential female beyond the circumstances which act upon her.

There are sex organs more than those of One but there are also erogenous zones that are not “sexual” - terrains of the body in which an eroticism decoupled from issue can grow. This is a distributive female body, committed in entirety neither to pleasure, procreation or means with an end; a body graded according to the assimilation of broken particles. Neither essentially female (its resources are far more than that of a recognisable woman) nor about the play of signs. A glitch in the system, a break in the circuit, an exemplary volume without contour. No wonder Deleuze-Guattari were so confused; “There are women, on the other hand, who tell everything, sometimes in appalling technical detail, but one knows no more at the end than at the beginning: they have hidden everything by celerity, by limpidity.” (TP 288)

Infinite secrecy, but no more cover-ups, no male-ordered mystique. A labiarinth. A mazing, coiling vortex. New flesh. Can you feel it?