There is a something gathering or What life is made of

"Your life is a sham 'til you can shout out loud: I am what I am!"

Albin Mougeotte

"The sodomite was a recidivist, but the homosexual is now a species."

Michel Foucault

"La identidad homosexual es un accidente sistemático producido por la maquinaría heterosexual, y estigmatizada como anti-natural, anonnal y abyecta en beneficio de la estabilidad de las prácticas de producción de lo natural."
Beatriz Preciado

[…] no "gay liberation movement" is possible as long as homosexuality is caught up in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality, a relation that ascribes them both to a common Oedipal and castrating stock, charged with ensuring only their differentiation in two noncommunicating series, instead of bringing to light their reciprocal inclusion and their transverse communication in the decoded flows of desire […]

 Deleuze & Guattari

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."

 Rosa Parks

"Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us." 

Gloria Steinem

There is an interesting meteorological formation gathering. For the first time in history, the rights of "sexual minorities" are subject to public vote. For the first time in history, we are voting on the new species: the homosexual, deciding whether to grant it the right to thrive within "our" good old institute of family. In other words, whether "homosexuals" can get married is something that the entire population should tell.  And in order to be able to vote, the whole population is supposed to be informed about what this species is and what it does. As usually, it is a process of truth production, much more than truth discovery.

In case you have missed it, there has been some serious production on the side of the anti-gay marriage people and some excellent mocking counterproduction and also some deadly serious LGBT reaction.

If you are this enormous lefty, as the most people reading my blog are, you will probably feel passionately for the gay marriage after seeing this stuff and you will hope that noone will take the NOM people seriously.

Still, there is a piece of me, a very queer piece, which thinks that we should leave marriage to the nommies, let them be excited about it and waste their time on it and use the existence of non-normalised love and non-normal households start to a discussion on real issues of life making. I'll let that piece of me write this blog. I/it will argue that same sex marriage is being supported for many wrong reasons, that it is a shady deal and that it is important to point out some fine-print clauses.

I would also like to express a certain Rosa-Parksy fatigue with the essentialising discourses on sex, with the universalising truth of the genitals and the mandatory sexualness and familiality of all desire. Many considerations here have been inspired by the writings of Beatriz Preciado, but I'm not sure she would agree with any of them. 

Wrong reason 1 - Familiality

"I would feel really horrible if two people who love each other as much as we do couldn't get married" says this lady in the anti-Prop 8 commercial.
So, after a certain threshold of loving each other, it is horrible if people can't get married and allowing for this is a matter of equality. The rest of the commercial kinda tells you why people who love each other need to have this right: because then they can be a family, a home, a domain of respected and even sacred privacy. Only a real family can play the the sorry_we_are_spending_the_day_with_our_kids card on a public discussion and make a point. If you want to claim that you know something about life, you need to get a life first, and that you do by being part of one of those life-making cornerstones of the society.

So what is happening now is that the cornerstone of the society might be ready to accept yet another kind of love as its starting point. In other words, there is the unquestioned and unquestionable institute of family that has been inhabited by "heterosexuals" for thousands of years and now it is maybe being opened to yet another sort of couples: the same sex couples. Nice. But why exactly to them? If marriage is de-linked from having-the-right-genitals-to-produce-children-in-principle (and I guess that's the rationale behind man-and-wife), why don't we allow family members to get married as well, as long as they promise they won't make babies? Or why don't we allow any number of people to get married? It looks like we are looking at a clear case of heterosexual generosity: they are willing to let gay couples in now and this is done gratuitously, as every generosity works. And as every generosity, it produces the recipient, an always already indebted community/species.

Wrong reason 2 - The innermost truth or genital fetishism

"Can you imagine making a record with someone who doesn't know your innermost secret?" this freshly out-of-the-closet country singer asks in the Ellen DeGeneres Show. No. And your innermost secret, which upon disclosure becomes your innermost truth, is about how you (in principle want to) use your "genitals".  The genitals are the locus of your ultimate truth.
For some familiar and familial reason, especially your parents' knowledge of how you use your "genitals" is crucial. But you have to hit the right level of abstractness in uttering this truth. If you go: "Mom, dad, I am aroused by male nipples, and the rest kinda follows from that", you are not at the innermost at all. Also being into fist-fucking or into a specific person's vagina is not really a coming-out story. No, my friend, you have to express a general preference for a certain gender (i.e. a certain set of genitals). And then the implicature is that that is the set of genitals which will be attached to the person with whom you will eventually end up or settle down and that is, I guess, what your parents should know about. Why would your parents care about this abstract genitals question?

I'm not sure, but there is a deep implicature there and the "progressive" legislation is running the risk of making it official: as long as the genitals are telling you your innermost truth and as long as it is a truth that you have to tell to the society, but first to your family, we will be talking of something related to reproduction and homosexuals will be constituted as less-than/deviant heterosexuals, whose practices are less useful/meaningful than the heterosexual ones. I mean, if it is not a family matter, if it has nothing to do with producing life, then how can it be one of the most important things we have to confess to the society? Wasn't the relevance-to-the-society actually a direct consequence of the possibility-to-produce-new-members? Well, exactly. The whole sexual identity frenzy and the concomitant coming-out fetishism is deeply rooted in the idea that what we do with our genitals is somehow crucial and the people should know.

In other words, as long you are gay (or straight) and it matters to report that "fact" to the community, you are moving within this Adam-and-Eve-land where genitals are oh so important, because they are crucial for both how life/love is made and the locus of the most important workings of the evil, an ethical epicentre par exellance. In Adam-and-Eveland, everything you ever do with your genitals is true and it is forever and ever. If you don't believe, join me for a though experiment. Imagine someone publishing a 5 second video of you eight years ago touching your nipples/anus with some cauliflower and obtaining pleasure. (I don't know whether I have to warn you that the action I have just described is perfectly legal and harmless.) Well, there is a good chance that you don't feel responsible for how you voted 8 years ago or what music you listened to. But the 5 seconds of genital truth is good enough to make your life impossible. Why really?
 

But it actually gets better. If looked at from that perspective, you can see that homosexuals are actually the ultimate activists of Adam-and-Eveland, and quite possibly, of heteronormativity: by insisting that genitals still tell the innermost truth (necessary for the definition of what they are), they are starting a losing game. Heterosexuals go to this space because everyone does and because you get kids, homosexuals do it just for the sake of the innermost truth, for who they make themselves to be. (Here is an example of bad Adam-and-Evian propaganda.)  

But the activism is not appreciated: the Adam-and-Eve-like space is the place where dichotomies and antagonisms thrive. The heterosexual is led into thinking of homosexuals as less-than: "They are using the same genitals as us, they do recognise that genitals matter, but they cannot make life. They are playing husband and wife. Why would their genitals (and the truth in them) even matter? Why is a gay man's anus more relevant than his hand?" And the homosexual goes: "But what is with the anus anyway? If  you don't care about it, why is touching your foot just silly and touching your anus a rape?" And this reasoning is painfully logical to all the inhabitatants of the Adam-and-Eveland. 

Wrong reason 3 - Creating legal subjects

For the first time, we are voting on the new species, created by the discourses of genital truth. We are voting on the familiar and familial institutions, which we assume to understand and want them to stay and we are voting on " the gays", whom we assume not to know sufficiently and whose love and sex can be examined to see whether they are good enough to start a family. Homosexuals are guests in this space, and the problem with guests is that the hospitality can be revoked at any point. Prop 8 is an excellent example of such a revocation.

I actually think that the things should be the other way around. We have no idea what a family is and whether we want it to stay and we know way too much about what a homosexual is, so much that we might have even strated believing that we know what the homosexual is.
Interestingly, people who are pro-same sex marriage insist that  the family will not change just because gay couples will start being families. The family, untouchable as it is, has something deeply judeo-christianly obscure, it is always already beyond us. You know how it goes: you date someone for ten years, you live together for 5 years and then on your wedding day you get a heart attack because this larger-than-life thing just overwhelms you too much. The family is like opera, like an abstract scheme in which no real human fits. It's like a classical language that everyone is correcting each other in and everyone is afraid to speak. Personally, I am not sure I need it. I think my world is a better place ever since I stopped to listen to God and psychoanalisis and decided to make friends with my "parents". I mean, popping out of someone's uterus is a damn queer place for a friendship to start. 
On the other hand, as a voter, you are invited to dissect "gays", thereby creating, mainstreaming and essentialising them as "others", creating a category which is turning into a legal one. We are getting the sexual other as a legal subject, the way we used to have the racial other as one. That is an interesting positioning of premises - it is just so easy and so colonial to question the "other" and their ability to inhabit "our" world instead of questioning what we have already become.

So what do I want?

I want us to negotiate out categories  and responsibly read the fine print. I think that this climate is actually ideal to stir some important discussions before we seal a new world of self-explanatoriness, into which we will  welcome those who are not yet with us, and who, in some queer and post-familial way, are all our children.
Importantly, I am not for abolishing anything,  I am just tired of having to want a family and a genital truth. I would like to see some categories go less obligatory because obligatory, universalised categories eat time, space and matter.

a. Family Shmamily 

I think that we are in a unique position to ask why those same-sex couples need to be a family?.What is the necessary link from love to family (because I know noone who claims that there is necessarily a link from family to love, I guess we all know better). It is especially interesting to see what is what is the added value of marriage over the "surogate institutions" (e.g. civil unions) which give the possibility of all the rights implied by marriage. Why is it so important to be like mom and dad and speak their language? I think that civil unions can be a good place to start questioning the larger-than-lifeness of normalised family, of the inside-love which is opposed to the outside-world. I think that we have a chance to stay secular for five minutes here (Rosi Braidotti). Quite possibly, we would need to buy and swallow (in all possible senses) significantly less stuff if we didn't believe in the universal need to shelter ourselves from the world in a union which has something crucial to do with genitals, but then in a very, very restrictive way. Because after all:

 b. Genitals Shmenitals

Here, I have to say I'm totally with Beatriz Preciado. Extending her metaphor, I'd say that gender is plastic, sex is lego and we have been playing in a very uninventive way, believing that there is a manual and the prefect form we should end up with. But there is none.
In that sense I would like to encourage the questions of the homosexual and the heterosexual from Adam-and-Eveland above. Yes, indeed, your anuses, vaginas and penises do not necessarily contain any more truth than your hands, toes or eyelashes.

Finally, I would like to extend another Beatriz' metaphor: that sexualities are like languages and we can all learn all of them. Most of you will be speakers of those atrificial European standard languages which have been naturalised in the romantic process of nation-formation. Such is Adam-and-Evian sexuality code as well. But as all languages, it leaks (Deleuze), it gives rise to other codes, to slang and the-speech-of-the-incompetent. I think we should use and appreciate these products of nature's inherent queerness as much as Preciadian queer Esperantos, which are meant as conscious counter-production. I guess I just told you that you should speak, especially in the moments when you are not sure what you will say.
And then we might help expand the world in which the magic words "I met someone" will not mean that you met someone with whom you might start a sacred and exclusive familial space, but just that: that you met someone. And that, in this queer world we live in, we are meeting someone every day. I believe that such a world is already with us and directly accessible from the tiring Adam-and-Eveland we inhabit most of the time.

And as for the weather debate from the beginning, I'm not sure we need that naturalising metaphor. It is much more up to us than that.

Porn - Running with way too blunt scissors and still hurting yourself

I was sending  the link to this text to the people masturbating on www.manroulette.com with the text "but then again, you don't have to do it here". The results were very interesting. 

Porn is no less important than the president/PM

Porn is politically relevant. Porn is an ideological state apparatus. I guess there are zero males and not all that many females whose sexuality hasn't substaintailly been influenced by porn. And given that sexuality is perceived as the ultimate truth of the individual in the advanced capitalism ("most intimate", "defining all we actually desire (to possess)"), we have to take porn seriously.

By and large, since in capitalism your masturabtion is your (most?) private thing, and there is no serious political discussion of it possible, it's no wonder that porn can get away being  the bastion of the phallocentric, dehumanising, non-fluffy discourse, which I am trying to defy here. But before you decide I am just vandalising your daily bread without a clear project, let me focus on one aspect which seems crucial to me - it is crucially dehumanising to the masturbator as well.


Self-dehumanisation

The obvious part, common to all phallocentric sex, is that you are reducing yourself to the poor_and_needy_being_which_just_needs_one_thing, suspending all your creativity and uniqueness for the moment. This, I believe, amounts to training ourselves in a dangerous skill - taking a break from accountability, we learn how to suspend our humanity, how to objectivise the other, a skill which comes in handy when it comes to Africa, or Afganistan, or beating someone to death.

But there is more. We do wrong to our "body" as well. Watching porn typically means closing down our body's affectability down, reducing one's senses to vision and one's body to the genitals. We are less_than_human to our "regular" selves. Consequently, we are missing the whole world of sensations, the whole life (in the sense of zoe) we are high functionaries of.

Or let me put it bluntly: sustainably fluffy people have better sex and better masturbation.


Every time you come/cum for a wrong reason

Every time you come/cum for a wrong reason, you are saying no to the life in you. (The one which doesn't answer to your name, the one you are time-sharing, as Rosi Braidotti would put it.)

But don't you worry, life/zoe will ask you the same question many more times and you will always have the chance to say yes. And  don't you worry about all the toilet paper you wasted in front of your computer, ethical responsability is a feature of the very moment when the decision is being taken and there is no god, no community, no entity whatsoever that can judge you for wasting the life in you in this way. After things have happened, that decision becomes part of the past you cannot change, but you can learn from.


So what do you do when you do yourself?

I am not really sure, I believe in ultimalty individual sexualities. I tend to think of the natural fecundity of things and the natural affectability of all people. I guess you are on your own there. And there is exactly where you should be on your own.

Is romantic love dehumanising?

This is the summary of a long discussion I have had with a number of people on a number of places.

My question:

Dehumanisation is usually conceived of as considering others as less_than_human. For instance, the collateral victims of the war in Iraq and women as represented in most porn production are often dehumanised, perceived as living lives which are less worthy than ours. These subjects are then seen as the ones who lack a life story worth telling.

This is crucially different from the temporary instrumentalisation which characterises our everyday social traffic - the checkout girl is only a checkout girl for me, but in this case I can be only a customer for her as well. So, I do not have to forget that "every human being, whatever her qualities, has her unjudgable splendor in a personal identity that is irrefutably her story" (Adriana Cavarero), I can just "suspend" this knowledge.

The question I would like to pose here is whether romantic love (as scripted in the popular culture, by which we are all influenced) is dehumanising. Does it amount to making others more_than_human? Does that also imply turning our head away from what we know from day 1 and what constitutes us as humans? Does the idea of "match made in heaven" actually imply depriving others of their story and rereading this story from our own perspective and for our purposes? Does the discourse of ultimate sense-giving through love (and making love qualitatively different from everything else in the universe of human interaction) give rise to an anxiety humans are not able to handle? Finally, don't we dehumanise ourselves by entering such an equation?

My answer (preceded by a huge quote from Secomb):


". . . he . . . who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing . . .
(Sappho: fragment 31)


This may speak perhaps of an intertwining of jealousy with love or it may, as Anne Carson suggests, indicate the necessary triangulation of love (Carson 1986: 12–17). This is not just the re-enactment of the conventional love triangle but also the articulation of the three components necessary for love. If love is lack, as Diotima’s account of Eros as the lacking child of Poverty and Plenty suggests, there needs to be not only lover and beloved but also that which comes between. Love desires what it lacks and its fulfilment would quench the passion of love. Love, thus, requires an obstacle that defers or displaces, preserving the lack and ensuring the preservation of desire. The beloved’s companion is not simply a rival to be overcome but the principle of obstruction that keeps love alive."
(Linnell Secomb, "Philosophy and Love - From Plato to Popular Culture")

Reading Secomb I grew aware of the enormous number of paralels between the transcendental philosophy and transcendental (romantic) love. They both essentially try to overcome life and access the higher, the eternal and the transcendent. Romantic love is therefore life-denying, in that it requires one to overcome mortality (by lasting forever), corporeality (by denying presence of attraction to others) and contingency (by the meant-to-be narrative). In sum, if the norm of romantic love is dehumanising, this is because it recruits one for life-denying goals.
As usually, it costs one much creativity to come up with a sustainable counterpart of this life-denying institute, but that is the only way out I can imagine.

Why gay marriage is nonsense

Actually, gay marriage is a contradiction in terms.
The whole idea of marriage has to do with a union of two (complex and unique) human beings who decide to make their ties socially/politically relevant.
The whole idea of being "gay" has to do with an abstract and general preference for a certain type of interaction with a certain type of human genitalia (an identity I tend to see as unnecessary and molar, but that's not crucial here).
Now predicating something like "gayness" on marriage clearly leads to a paradox - your choice for one person to "love officially" is orthogonal to what you generally like to do/see/have/enter. What's more, as the history of love has tought us, it is possible (and it is even enormously fluffy) to love someone in spite of their attributes, against our general preference, to go for the who in spite of the what.
It that sense, I am against gay marriage as a goal on the social agenda. Of course, I am for opening the institute of marriage for every group of consenting humans, regardless of gender or anything else. But ranting about gay marriage has nothing to do with opening, it has to do with closing, entrenching and pigeonholing. And if this ranting goes on long enough, the society will eventually get a mojoritarian and molar formation ("community") which will code and prescribe what gay marriage is - a coding which will necessarily be more detailed than that for the "other", "heterosexual" marriage. This molar formation exists in the Netherlands already (Rosi Braidotti) and I can imagine other European societies with emancipatory programmes for homosexuals will develop their own very soon.
What is to be done then? I think it's all about reframing. You could say I'm asking you to use an unnecessary complicated formulation, because if you are fighting for/supporting "opening of the institute of marriage for every group of consenting humans" in the world we live in, you are basically talking about "gays" and "lesbians", ergo you are fighting for/supporting "gay marriage".
Well, I would like to claim that there is a crucial difference: if you are for "gay marriage", you are supporting a "gays'" cause, you are doing something for the "the gays", you are hoping "the gays" will get there and then you will be happy for "them". In other words, in case you don't read my quotation marks, I think you then participate in building another molar formation.
On the other hand, if you are fighting for/supporting "the opening of the institution of marriage", you are fighting for/supporting a cause which belongs to all of us who think that the gender of their spouses should not be of interest to the state, you are fighting for a society in which there is a public and political recognition of the simple fact that we have no right to constrain consenting adults of inhabiting the institute of marriage. To be sure, I am not pleading for a genderless society here and I am not asking people to pretend that the gender of their spouses is irrelevant to them. I am just asking for it to be irrelevant in front of the authorities. It is like being a teacher or a checkout person - of course I have noticed that my first class teacher was a man and that the checkout girl today was a girl, but I am glad it could have been the other way around as well. The state should be blind/indifferent when it comes to marriage just as it (hopefully) was when that teacher and that checkout girl were being hired.

A friend, a famous author and very many kitchen knives

This is not a story, since there is only one event in it and even that one is hypothetical. In case you aren’t really paying attention, I will warn you when the event hypothetically occurs.

But still, meet my two characters – A Friend (AF) and a Famous Author (FA). I will make them both male, although they are based on very many females as well. But then again, who isn't?

I know you can’t summarise a person, so I won’t. I shall tell you what AF and FA believe to be their ultimate personal truths, what they believe to be in the summaries preceding their records in the omniscient cosmic computer.

AF is young and good looking. AF is generally fluffy and generally hoping to be met, snatched away and held tight the rest of his earthly existence. AF deserves to experience real love. AF would also expect a number of facts concerning his penis and his sexual fantasies to be in that record.

FA is rich and famous. FA is generally considered attractive and generally hoping to meet someone whom he will consider interesting and inspiring enough to be able to say he is happy that that person is alive. FA is also proficient at pretending that he’s happy that people are alive. AF would also expect a number of facts concerning his penis and his sexual experiences to be in that record.

Now I have to interrupt the “story” in order (1) to add something important that the omniscient computer, AF, FA, you and me know, but no one ever puts in their expected record and (2,3) to tell you why I am mentioning AF and FA together.

(1) Due to a development of ideas which has to do with an Athenian homosexual gang, a hippie from Judea and a doctor from Vienna, both AF and FA believe that having sexual desire is “naughty”. Due to the fact that the way the hippie from Judea influences most of us has changed considerably in the last period, neither AF nor FA believes that it is “naughty” with respect to some transcendental moral authority, they simply believe that their desire is essentially violent to others and therefore unethical/nasty.

(2) Possibly somehow due to (1), both AF and FA have the exactly same gaze in most of their interaction with strangers (and that keeps striking me). I have no idea whether they would notice that if they were to meet (that was your hypothetical event!), but they would look at each other in exactly same way. It is the you-don’t-want-to-know-what-I-am-thinking-right-now-in-my-naughty-nasty-porn-cinema-head gaze, the you-have-no-idea-what-my-inner-animal-has-up-its-sleeve gaze, the there-is-a-smoky-underground-casino-and-an-old-prostitute-saying-hi-through-this-gaze-gaze. Some people would call it flirty, I wouldn’t.

(3) Both AF and FA spoke to me recently and both of them claimed they had learned so much from talking to me, whereas I had learned so little from them. This is evidence that nothing is less true.

Oh, the knives. Well, you know, both AF and FA carry their desire as people carry daggers, only or primarily intended to restrict the freedom/life of others. I deeply believe that desire is a kitchen knife - something entirely indispensable for so many functions, a thing that, if used creatively, can help one make so many beautiful things/futures for oneself and others. Of course you can stab people with a kitchen knife, but you can also stab people with a pencil. You can stab people with anything if there is enough talking about stabbing.

The gaze shared by AF and FA is a form of permanent talking about stabbing. I guess there has been enough effort to hide/bury all the daggers. I am hereby proposing trying to turn them back into what they really are – kitchen knives.