RE: [-empyre-] response to Angela and bye bye




From: "Gregory Little" <glittle@oberlin.net>

Joseph wrote:
>That is why I find Gregory?s proposal for a nuetered non-sexed viractuality
abhorant


I think I probably have not been clear enough about the "viractual
condition" I am describing. I am not describing a state of neutered
sexuality, not a neutrality, not a state of negation, removal, erasure, or
lack....not neutralized...the state I am groping to describe is a state of
"both AND" relative to gender, a location beyond genital-identification, a
place of potential arousal-attraction-stimulation that is not genito-centric
and therefore cannot be called sexual in that it is not focused on climax or
procreation but on decentered stimulation, desire, pain, and joy. A
construction of self, identity, that is beyond such labels as male, female,
new locations of erogeny other than the genitals, alterior to even the
cutaneous; locations for mind and memory that are not of the brain....but my
only zone of contention with your definitions of viractualism is the
necessity of leaving the body to soar....for me it must happen through the
body.


>I hope I have not been too verbose, too introspective and too articulate
here and that >I have bored you. I know most people have a limited
intellectual span for this kind of >examination and that what people want
are accounts of my sexual adventures. {^_~} Such
>criticism does sting me, much the way that drop of scalding olive oil had
>the check of sleeping Eros.

again, for me your words are extremely stimulating, poetic, unique,
difficult, and, as I said early, oddly, admirably clear.



Hi Gregory. Thanks for your warm words. I do think that you are simplifying my take on disembodiment though. For me there is a leaving and staying occurring simultaneously. But never mind. Let?s move on.

Your search for a "decentered stimulation, desire, pain, and joy" happily reminds me of the writer Raymond Roussel - because in his work Roussel invents crazy machines that produced ecstatic results through the use of repetitions and combination/permutations. An obsessional machine-like logic provided his art with a seemingly pure spectacle of endless variety of textual games and combinations flowing in circular form. BTW - within this writings Roussel described a number of fantastic machines, including a painting machine in "Impressions of Africa". This painting machine wonderfully describes and foresees the arrival of computer-robotic painting technology and it's application to visual art that we have available to us today - a century after he envisioned it.

I think that he relates to your search for a "location beyond genital-identification" because Roussel's themes and procedures involved imprisonment and liberation, exoticism, cryptograms and torture by language - all formally reflected in his working technique with their inextricable play of double images, repetitions, and impediments; all giving the impression of the pen running on by itself through the dreamy usage and baroque play of mirrored form. Roussel's technique and the process he developed lends itself well to the creation of unforeseen, automatic and spontaneously inventive movements which gives the reader the feeling of prolonging action into eternity through the ceaseless, fantastic constructions of the work itself, transmitting an altered, exalted and orgasmic state of mind which after the initial dazzling creates one predominant overall effect - that of creating doubt through mechanical discourse.

The image of enclosure is common with Roussel where a secret to a secret is held back, systematically imposing a formless anxiety in the reader through the labryrinthian extensions and doublings, disguises and duplications of his texts, which make all speech and vision undergo a moment of annihilation. Roussel presents to us the model of silent perfection of the eternally repetitive mechanical machine, which functions independently of time and space - pulling the artist into a logic of the infinite.

"The process evolved and I was led to take any sentence." said Roussel in his last book, "How I Wrote Certain of My Books" - the last of his conceptual machines; the machine which contains and repeats within its mechanism all those mental machines he had formerly described and put into motion, making evident the machine which produced all of his machines - the mastermachine. All of these machines map out a space, which is circular in nature and thus an abstract attempt at eliminating time. They reproduce the old myths of departure, of loss and of return. They construct a crisscrossed mechanical map of the two great mythic spaces so often explored by Western imagination: space that is rigid and forbidden, containing the quest, the return and the treasure (for example the geography of the Argonauts and the labyrinth) - and the other space of polymorphous, the visible transformation of instantly crossed frontiers and borders, of strange affiliations, of spells and of symbolic replacements (the space of the Minotaur).

The bachelor machines of Picabia and Duchamp continued Roussel's mechanical line of thought (in 1912 Duchamp, along with Appollinaire and Picabia, attended a performance of "Impressions of Africa") along with Franz Kafka's mechanism for torture through tattooing in the "Penal Colony". By 1972 the post-bachelor machine was already there, waiting for Deleuze and Guattari to hook it up to the body-without-organs, to plug it into the logic of the desiring machine so as to achieve a total interconnectivity with the infoworld through schizo-capitalism. So you are in very good company.






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