"Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs."
-Kathy Acker, Ange's Song after She Crawled through London

Richard Muzka

By Manner of an Introduction:

Catastrophe I, we, have spent all our time so far in this world denying the inevitability of catastrophes.
The small catastrophes of everyday life; the irremediable catastrophe of death.
Meanwhile, we entertain our fickle minds with the possibility of jouissance, which is itself a catastrophe:
"[A] lawyer [...] sent his family away for the weekend, rented a room in a hotel, built for himself this huge dildo with wire and red cotton and slowly impaled himself [...on this] contraption on top of a toilet seat, wearing a gas mask and women's shoes. [When] his body [was found] it was already decomposing." (1)
The loss of control begins, the mind moves back, atrophies as it concentrates on sensation, space and time collapse as the singularity of the experience absorbs all, the body sheds its tense envelope and stretches out infinite and formless, overwhelmed with sensation, body and mind disintegrate and unite into sensation, wet, fizzing, sensate, gone.
None of this is transcendent-it is the opposite of transcendence: pleasure, flesh against flesh, the pure experience of materialism. Can this experience be represented? If so, what does representing this experience implicate?

Scandal

Ou whole discourse on obscenity is shaped by law. According to Beverley Brown in her essay Troubled Vision: Legal Understanding of Obscenity (2), libel laws (in Britain) were originally drafted to protect the person being represented, and then shifted their concern to the effects of the representation on the audience.
Two sets of criteria were put into place: "indecent and obscene" and "deprave and corrupt."
The first criterion, indecency, focused on an audience's subjective reactions, on its potential shock or outrage, especially in the case of unwitting audiences. In drafting this bill, the main concern was public order: it was thought that indecent representations might rouse passions and lead individuals to disturb the peace in the form of riotous behavior. Curiously though, as Brown states, "[...] the subjective response [was not] presumed to be ofendedness; on the contrary sexuality's incitement to disorder, in its original conception, is all too likely to be inspired in favor of the representation, not against it." Nonetheless, during the 1930s the concern with affronted sensibilities was eventually incorporated into indecency law which then began to increasingly focus on taste and discretion, at a time when there emerged the concept of "propriety of place."

You can fuck all you want in the 'privacy' of your own home. If you get caught doing it in a public place, however, you may very well end up in jail.

The category of "deprave and corrupt" was born after that of indecency, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Its importance lies in the fact that it gives the government much more sweeping powers than indecency laws. However, these powers are less notorious as the kind of censorship they perform is usually invisible (i.e. material is censored before it can be viewed by the public). An act was passed in 1857 which allowed police to seize and destroy material it considered obscene if its 'publishers' could not show that it had 'redeeming social value.' As Brown notes, "this is a complete reversal of the normal burden of proof in criminal matters, as encapsulated in the idea of innocent until proven guilty." The category of "deprave and corrupt" was conceived not in terms of abating public revolt, but rather to fend off the possible deformation of an individual reader or viewer's character or psyche, a process thought of as insidious, which could lead to social harm in the long term. Thus, the concept was linked to disease, both of the body and of the mind (venereal disease, alcoholism, etc.), laying the ground for a theoretical discourse on degeneracy.
The role of the audience's imagination became important, as books, though sexually inexplicit, were thought to deprave or corrupt if they led the reader to interpret the material in sexual terms.

But what is imagination if not the perverse reordering of things, the engendering of as yet unknown beings, the spawning of monsters?

Over the years, the concerns expressed through both these sets of laws have led to an ever increasing segmentation of public space. Certain places were designated as either appropriate or inappropriate (generally the latter) for certain kinds of representation. In terms of likely viewers, there was a special emphasis on the protection of children. Though people gained greater private freedom, they paid for this through tighter mechanisms of control on public space. While it was accepted that difference and diversity existed in private, their expression in the public realm was cause for suppression, as the confrontation between individuals' distinct ideas, mores and practices could lead to conflict. Therefore the lowest common denominator of decency was adopted and enforced in order to avoid social disturbance. Thus was born a politics of the offended. 'Responsible' citizens were encouraged to watch and snitch on their neighbors.

Paradoxically, we were compeled to become voyeurs.

All this is based on what Brown calls "realist fundamentalism," the belief that an 'obscene' representation may lead the viewer to commit an act of the same nature. In her words, this fundamentalism is concerned with "the representation's ultimate effects, via the audience, on the 'real world.'" In this context, she adds, "a work that can evade a realist interpretation is a work that can be found non-obscene." Thus, in order to be considered 'art,' a work has to be able to distance itself from reality-its literal, sexual content must be interpreted as symbolic for a deeper spiritual reality. High-brow culture, artists, museums, critics, do this by coating issues of sexual representation with a veneer of respectable haughtiness-if, as a viewer, you don't understand its 'artistic' (i.e. transcendent) value, you're an idiot.

Sade: the Irreducible Singularity of Passions

In her book Soudain un bloc d'abîme, Sade (3), Annie Le Brun states that what most disturbs us about the Marquis is his absolute materialism and atheism. In Western history, he is the maximum exponent of these beliefs. All the tableaux of violence and sexual 'debauchery' in Sade's work simply serve to illustrate over and over again (sometimes ad nauseam) how categorical and unshakable his credence is.
The scandal that scenes from his books have generated (and continue to generate) only obscure the greater issues at hand. In a similar way, during the revival Sade's work experienced in the twentieth century, writers such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski tried to find a transcendent element in his writing, giving it a mystical, or even religious, reading. According to Le Brun, this element very obviously does not exist, though it calms us to think it does, because Sade's radical posture disallowing for any possibility of transcendence scares us to death.
"The universality [of Sade's power] would be to assert, time and again, the irreducible singularity of our passions.
"At once, it is the universal perverted by the Unique, law contradicted by arbitrariness and reason corrupted by impulse."
It seems obvious to me, then, that that which is obscene is considered as such because it only represents what it is. By explicitly depicting the frail, ephemeral nature of our existences, it negates our greatest, most foolish and presumptuous dream-our longing to transcend.

"Whole rotten world come down and break. Let me spread my legs."

1) Sylvère Lotringer, interview with Rubén Gallo in TRANS
2) In New Formations number 19, Spring 1993, University Press, Cambridge, England
3) Folio essais, Gallimard, Paris for Jean -Jacques Pauvert, 1986