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Towards a Libidinal Economy of Kink by Clarice P. Rios





"In the end, the strap-on dildo could be simultaneously considered a synthetic sex organ, a hand grafted on at the trunk, and a plastic extension of the clitoris." - Paul B. Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto


“'I stripped the will and the person from you like collars and chains' (Lingis 1994:61). What remains is machinic, inhuman, beyond emotion, beyond subjection: 'the illusion of having no choice, the thrill of being taken” (Califia 1993a:172)." - Sadie Plant, Coming Across the Future


When anyone thinks about telling that story, the first question that takes place is: where to start? Oedipus, the phallus, dysphoria, the lack, hysteria, all of these are attempts to grasp or explain what constitutes the pleasure of the Other. But, first of all, what constitutes the Other, that eternal pervert, mad and possibly lesbian Other?


The main thing someone must understand to answer that question (and there is not one, but many answers) is: the heterosexual society needs to fabricate the Other to make itself real. Monique Wittig was the first who synthesised that obsession for production of Otherness as the Straight Mind, the great and former pillar of heterosexual regime. Nick Land in his most left-wing article “Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity”, links the Kantian thought directly with the process of colonisation, the necessity of a stable relation to the other, he argues, is only achieved through a process that turns the other in the same, the possibility of a real otherness is closed. “Thus, when thought by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality.”1


First, the norm: you won’t marry your mother, nor your sister, nor a man, sex should only be had with (better, in) vaginas that are penetrated only by organic phalluses. Goal: reproduction, reproduction of the same in all scales. And secondly, to make that sexual fiction real (natural), the Other, but there's a thing which the heterosexual regime perceived in his trajectory: to produce otherness in great scale, you need factories (it's not a coincidence that conclusion was made in the advent of the Capital, the overproduction as an Entity). And then, psychiatry and sanatorium emerged as the great heterosexual venture, to reinforce the norm and dope these aberrant deviants. There is no doubt that there were madmen and queers in previous societies, but only when industrial capitalism took place did the heterosexual regime make his creation a real process of production.


“Madmen, above all, are individual victims of social dictatorship” writes Antonin Artaud in his Letter to the Medical Directors of Lunatic Asylums. They are very silly people who think that otherness is only for homosexuals and schizophrenics; for an instructive example, the masturbator was the great enemy of institutions, especially the church, but not free from the medico-psychiatric complex, subject to electric choke, clitoridectomy, partial castration - until pornography makes lots of money, so the masturbator can remain as a dirty secret. The female sexuality is entirely constituted and pathologised by hysteria, and in that case doctors openly talk about the necessity of making devices to achieve the “production of female hysterical paroxysm” (later known as orgasms), these devices are now in the market as domestic vibrators, and this is not a unique case as we will see ahead.


The vibrators are simply one of many devices created by the heterosexual industries of otherness who try to domesticate the monsters, like the electric shocks, the chastity, the fear of becoming crazy. Straight mind produces the Other, but has an extreme fear of its creation, like Victor Frankenstein. But something happens, something strange and unknown, something that refuses the domestication: libido. It always takes place like a virus, despite the social institutions that try to impose normativity. “Of course, it is the monster, who demands an audience with its maker.”2



Libido, violence and weird sex: the pleasure of Other




Libido, celebrated by Deleuze and Guattari as the great discover from freudian psychoanalysis, a force that involves all the social field and production, triangulated by Oedipus ('father-mommy-me'), but always an impersonal, brutal and powerful matter-energy. All social institutions of heterosexual regime work to capture the libido, they are the territorialising, paranoiac and despotic pole, which was first exposed in Anti-Oedipus. Of course these institutions create a moral, reinforce the norm is to create stability, the holy books, the priests, the churches, all to guarantee the dominion of God (a fiction who, perfectly conscient of his fragility, needs to impose itself as the only reality possible).


How to explain, in a system of straight, catholic and human norms, that some people cum when beaten, hanged and rope? That the deconstruction of the body can be pleasurable and orgasmic... don't electrocute them, they will like it! Lyotard talks about a sensuality that resides in senseless, in madness, who are really disconnected from genitality and reproduction, and links that as a product of the deterritorialising pole of capital that Land calls “molecular death”, the desire that “repels the organism”, “a hydraulic tendency to the dissipation of intensities”.3


That intimate relationship between sensuality and death is crucial here, explored with so much effort by Bataille, who established: “What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? - a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?”. It is no coincidence that his novel Story of the Eye, published under the pseudonym Lord Auch, was one of the great symbols of weird sex in fiction, next to 120 Days of Sodom by Sade and Venus in Furs by Masoch, it's the great fictional study on eroticism-libido and death, for so many times crude and graphic. At some point, Marcelle, one of his sexual partners, hanged herself and Bataille (or Lord Auch, the narrator's name is never mentioned in the novel, which leaves room for speculation) have sex next to her corpse, taking Simone's (his other partner) virginity, he describes:



“It was very painful for both of us, but we were glad precisely because it was painful. Simone stood up and gazed at the corpse. Marcelle had become a total stranger, and in fact, so had Simone at that moment. I no longer cared at all for either Simone or Marcelle. Even if someone had told me it was I who had just died, I would not even have been astonished, so alien were these events to me.”4


This quote, written with passion and horror at the same time, has more to conceptualise and explains libido better than the best of freudian psychoanalysis make in the last decades, the pleasure does not have any concern with moral, and therefore does not have any concern with being pure, produces boundaries between sex and pain, has nothing to do with persons who are occasionally and casually object of love: impersonal. And it is important to insist on the impersonal aspect of it, because only being impersonal can involve the social field, all production, all societies, and can connect anyone who wants to with your becomings and drives.


“I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, lime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, of course, which merely serves as a backdrop.”5


What really matters is the deconstruction of the body, a means to access death. Here there is no representation, no metaphor, it's not a question of making death “human”, but making us inhuman, deprogram ourselves in order to make a real contact with unknownness (the Outside of body, the Outside of human). That is precisely a schizoanalytical problem: when Deleuze and Guattari analyse the relation of schizoanalysis with politics, they make clear that their creation has nothing to do with political programs or parties, it's about experimentation, libidinal experimentation: “No political program will be elaborated within the framework of schizoanalysis.”6 They don't make that movement to drift away from the problem of a revolutionary practice, but to recreate that practice, not as a unique and messianic road, but as multiplicities infected by desire, to emphasise schizoanalysis as a new way of make contact with the unknown, revolutionary precisely because it doesn’t take revolution as a duty that takes place by the effort of a disciplined and centralised group of militants, but as a surrender to the impersonal forces of libido. “As opposed to Reich, schizoanalysis makes no distinction in nature between political economy and libidinal economy.”7


Lyotard, in the last paragraph of Libidinal Economy, says: “What would be interesting would be to stay put, but quietly seize every chance to function as good intensity conducting bodies.”8. The next chapter of this article will analyse the practices of kink community, the community of the good intensity conducting bodies.



The leather dyke comes from the future: a brief study of the body deconstruction  practices in kink community





Dildos, ropes, whips, you don't know what's going to happen to you, and this is more exciting than you've had in your entire life. Foucault calls San Francisco and New York S&M communities “laboratories of sexual experimentation”, for him S&M are “a process of invention” that produces a “desexualisation' of the body. What he means by desexualisation is the same as molecular death drive, the body without organs, a schizophrenisation that repels the organism through rigorous practices, “a remapping of the body's erotic sites, a redistribution of its so-called erogenous zones, a breakup of the erotic monopoly traditionally held by the genitals”.9


Take for this first moment the dildopractice made by Paul B. Preciado after the death of Guillaume Dustan in the chapter Videopenetration from Testo Junkie: a camera, three dildos (9½ x 1½ in; 9¾ x 2½ in; 5½ x ¾ in), testosterone in gel form, a book, a hair cutting machine, a basin with water, a towel, a small mirror, lubricant, hypoallergenic glue, a sheet of white paper, an anal-dilator gel and shaving cream. A brief look, the great part of these things don't look any remotely connected to sex. He put the camera on, shave his hair, make a mustache with hair and glue, apply testosterone, shave his vagina and anus, rubs one of his dildos on the book, and insert two dildos in his orifices, "Looking into the camera again: “This testosterone is for you, this pleasure is for you.”


I don’t watch the mini-DV I just filmed. I don’t even number it. I put it into its transparent red case and write on the label:


October 3, 2005. day of your death."10


What happened here? Can we call it sex? Masturbation? A tribute? I classify that and other practices as libidinal experiences, it's not only sex that is at stake here, all identity seems to dissolve, plasticity takes place when Preciado turns into Guillaume and there is a boundary between death and life that is broken for a while. Lyotard, based on a quote by Xaviere Lafont, talk about something that is not possible to describe in the sadomasochist experience, “It is a drug”, but is beyond punishment, there is no real punishment in kink practices, better “what succumbs to punishment, with regard to this vertigo, is the illusion of the self”.11


People who are interested in that drug, that thing beyond reason that takes place in these practices, are historically persecuted as we seem, and in order to resists, these people passed through a process of becoming-community, Gayle Rubin classifies that as “the relocation of homoeroticism into these quasi-ethnic, nucleated, sexually constituted communities”12 especially in big cities. Kink groups - at the time “S&M groups” - like Lesbian Sex Mafia, Samois and The Outcasts appeared as centers of decentralised libidinal experimentation, improving and inventing techniques, making such practices survive in face of the moral panic generated by heterosexual society.


Kink practices evolve by time for a bunch of reasons, technology, new forms, new practices. These groups engage in efforts to make a “safe” space for people who want to push limits, and it's not because there is a necessity to hygienise or rationalise what is “dirty and irrational”, unlike common sense thinks, these practices require an extreme rigor to take place. Antonin Artaud in order to create his theater of cruelty, was who best established these aspects of rigor in the experimentalist practices.“And philosophically speaking, what indeed is cruelty? From the point of view of the mind, cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.”13 The obsession of kink community with safeness? is more like a rigor with make a real deconstruction and a real exploration than a need to rationalise libido, how offer security - in a strict sense - in practices like genital torture or extremely humiliation? You can't, but an instrumentalisation of certain instruments or practices and a trust between participants (tops and bottoms) can make an environment more open to possibilities of inventing new pleasures, where the artificial boundaries between pleasure and pain are broken in all senses.


Again in Testo Junkie, Paul Preciado describes something that he calls “critical reappropriation”,  a new form of political agency when the Others take for themselves some practices and products (codes?) from the 'Pharmacopornography regime' and resignifies them, passing through a inhuman-becoming, he says about his experimentations with testosterone: “In this way I become one of the somatic connectives through which power, desire, release, submission, capital, rubbish, and rebellion circulate.” There is a powerful affirmation here, one of a positive dissolution in some processes that make someone capable to intervene in the world, to resignify devices and make them serve to explore through the unknown, but not before being touched by them. Kink communities have done so much work in critical reappropriation, use of dildos, violet wands, military signs, things that are originally part of heteropatriarchal weaponry against the Other are rediscovered in a libidinal sense and used to deprogramming body rather than try to organise him, obviously the libidinal content of these practices exist since their outset, but are hidden behind many layers of normative discourses. Kink, as a navigational space with no commitments to the heterosexual regime, can expose the libidinal economy of all things that are appropriated by it.



For a future of inhuman possibilities and pleasures


This essay does not have any attempt to exhaust a debate, there are many things to talk about these practices and there will be more day after day, because new practices emerge and new becomings are discovered. Sketching some libidinal economy is always a difficult task, because there is no static and immutable point in libido movements.


Kink, as a deterritorialised community, stands as a great threat for heterosexual regime (the territorialising pole), as his bastard son, a result of the large-scale production of Otherness which, like all overproduction, overflows. That's not a matter of organised insurrection against state, parties or something like that, it's a matter of silent, unconscious and asymmetrical rebellion. Starting from accelerationist diagnoses, that “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”14, the cosmopolitical war - in his anastrophic front - is about how to engage in the future in his most deterritorialising flows. “Change for the machines. Have you got the right change?”15



In “Orlando, My Political Biography” Preciado talks about a planetary mutation that is taking shape, as the film shows, a planetary mutation that involves many “Orlandos” (the Others). Engaging in the future is first to recognise that the heterosexual regime has been a failed venture in the last decades, sexual dissidents, gender terrorists and nonconforming people are not an exotic group, but a flow of molecular death that infects society. Practices that transform instruments of torture into new pleasures, that make dildos part of new synthetic bodies, that explores animal-becomings with ears, tails and paws, has anticipated not a canceled future, but an imminent post-humanity.


“Abolish normality is turn the meaning of 'normal' solely and exclusively in those practices and knowledges that destabilise the integrity of what is offered for us as world and as 'human nature'" writes Cassia Siqueira in her article 'Abolish normality once and for all!”


Perhaps there is a kind of optimism here, only time (if it survives) will tell.


FOOTNOTES


1 M. Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 28.

2 S. Stryker, M.K. Wark (editor), When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2024), 140.

3 N. Land. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings (Falmouth and New York:Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2010), 283.

4 G. Bataille. Story of the eye (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987), 50. (My emphasis).

5 Ibid, 49.

6 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. R. Lane (London: Athlone, 198'I), 380.

7 Ibid, 381.

8 J.-F. Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. l.H. Grant (London: Athlone, 1993), 262.

9 D. M. Halperin. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 88.

10 P. B. Preciado. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in The Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013), 20.

11 J.-F. Lyotard, Op. cit., 63.

12 G. S. Rubin, Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 157.

13 A. Artaud, The Theater and Its Double (New York: Grover Press, 1958), 101.

14 N. Land, Op. cit., 443.

15 M. B. Kronic (editor), A. Avanessian (editor). #Accelerate – The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), 320.