1
America hates sex in general, but it especially hates orgasms, the pinnacle of the experience. It hates that which it doesn’t understand.
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?
