Orgies, Orgasms and Other Organization
Flesh, fluids, skin, tits and asses no longer belong to the late hours in a dark joint somewhere around the corner but to our daily life input. This one could imagine resulting in people walking around in a constant state of suspended excitement, but the effect seems to be rather the opposite; erotic saturation. That is, the kind of indifference that makes us walk past commercials without even noticing the image. Or, as we know from photography; overexposure erases images rather then reinforce them.
It is clear that desire/eroticism is not something that needs to be kept in the dark of nature and mysticism in order to have an effect on our bodies. Desire is culture as much as culture is desire. In that sense it seems an impossibility to go back in history to replace the explicit with older models (chastity/taboos/censorship), as much as it seem impossible to be thinking in concepts of free love and sexual liberation. Yet it is interesting to imagine how erotic bodies can be produced as an alternative to mass media representations and the mechanisms that follow.
It’s about rethinking the possibility of bodily relations, not about having orgies every Saturday night as a way to live experimental desire. The virtuality or the imagination, proposed by invented sexual relations is there for the spectator not to have to identify with the actual situation but with a more abstract notion of sensual or erotic experience. This doesn’t mean that one can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to feel the availability that steams from the blue figures or even arousal and excitement. It might exactly be about allowing that to happen, because sexuality is not repressive, phallic, patriarchal and oedipal but rather something positive, productive, playful, inventive and active.
What is pleasure and how many different forms can you imagine it taking?
An orgy is not only a word for sexual promiscuity but for excessive activities in general. Traditionally food, drinking and dancing were the main categories, but why not think “orgy” in terms of expressions. Orgy as an abstract excess, whether it is in relation to color, bodily excitement, rhythm or to something completely other.
Thinking sexuality in terms of bodily pleasure detached from a psychological subject is an attempt to produce such excess and to avoid or maybe expose cliché mechanisms. Instead of thinking the conformity of the suits as an idealization of certain prototypes “to come” is about being allowed to perform all of them at the same time or in shifting relations; passive/active, strong/weak, above/below, dominant/dominated, satisfied/satisfying, licking/licked. It could produce a danger of erasing difference completely, but maybe in this case the fiction turns the danger into an advantage. The body covered in cloth becomes surface and gains an object-”hood” or thing-“ness” which makes it possible to see the body as body. At the same time it covers up all wholes and cavities thereby removing the wetness of the erotic body. This allows the most intimate to be viewed without being accompanied by repressive and conventional feelings of shame and guilt e.g Christian heritage. These a-personal or a-subjective expressions give space for images of new kinds of pleasures. Not representing reality as it is but as transformations and abstractions of known representations. It is exactly not about sex only, but it’s about the structures that make sex function as it functions. It is about making visible how subjectivity creates social structures; both intimate/interior and exterior. How spaces that usually produce a certain kind of behavior can be altered by altering our understanding of the (sexual) subject.
Sex, couple dancing, wrestling and coming all exist in specific social spaces and each of them proposes a different way of considering the body. I am not proposing orgy structures as substitutes of other sexual relations but I propose a reconsideration of how bodies can connect, how they can obtain new forms of pleasure and how sexuality can be imagined differently. Practicing to imagine differently we know very well from cinema where blue screen footage allows the editor to replace one background with another. To cut out the figures from one reality to fit them into another. The dinosaur wasn’t really there, nor were the cars flying or the sea burning, but the illusions were produced. This expresses quite clearly the possibility of cinematic fiction but also the greatest difference between cinema and theater. “to come” should not, or maybe more correctly theater cannot produce this kind of illusion. The fiction is not on the stage but in the audience, where a space is left open for the spectator to fill in the missing features or to leave them as impersonal expressions. The hair, the eyes, the hands and the mouths can look however we desire them to but they can also remain unknown. Whether the filling in is actually taking place or not is of lesser importance than the “potential projection”. The body without face, depth and personal features becomes a body available for imagination. A state of watching which at the same time is recognizable and unrecognizable, complete and incomplete, actual and virtual.
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