Sonnet 129

As A.O. Scott relates in his review of the movie Shame, this poem, "as incisive an anatomy of erotic compulsion as exists in English, begins by evoking 'the expense of spirit in a waste of shame' and cycles through the rages and frustrations of lust before collapsing in exhausted fatalism." For full effect, ingest slowly by duly masticating.

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

-William Shakespeare 

Capitalism: Dukkha par excellence?

(notes for a chapter on Buddhist Ethics in my dissertation on Buddhism and Ethics of the Erotic)

According to David Harvey’s reading of Marx, capitalism requires ever evolving ingenuity in the “art” of inducing psychic, emotional, and physical turmoil so that it can “capitalize” on the perpetually renewed sense of urgent need that is generated (The Condition of Postmodernity, pp. 106-107):

The struggle to maintain profitability sends capitalists racing off to explore all kinds of other possibilities. New product lines are opened up, and that means the creation of new wants and needs. Capitalists are forced to redouble their efforts to create new needs in others, thus emphasizing the cultivation of imaginary appetites and the role of fantasy, caprice, and whim. The result is to exacerbate insecurity and instability, as masses of capital and workers shift from one line of production to another, leaving whole sectors devastated, while the perpetual flux in consumer wants, tastes, and needs becomes a permanent locus of uncertainty and struggle... Capitalism, in short, is a social system internalizing rules that ensure it will remain a permanently revolutionary and disruptive force in its own world history. If, therefore, ‘the only secure thing about modernity is insecurity,’ then it is not hard to see from where that insecurity derives.

As capitalism functions according to the assumption that content persons are the worst of consumers, it must perpetually manufacture discontent. Ideally, the seeds of perpetual discontent can be sown such that individuals never cease to crave and thus to spend. This “basic fact” of capitalism suggests that its mortal enemy may not be Marxism but Buddhism. To the extent that Buddhist thought and practice is Buddhist precisely because it is aligned against psychic, emotional, and physical disturbance, turmoil, and/or anguish (dukkha) it is necessarily hostile to, never mind incompatible with, capitalism. The question, however, of whether or not Buddhism is equipped to take on such an omnipotent foe is very much an open question. As modern Buddhism matures and clinical studies are undertaken to legitimate its contemplative practices, the specter of an anti-Buddhist doppelgänger becomes frighteningly real. To the extent that meditation practices are being appropriated to keep individuals docile—i.e. for the sake of anesthetizing individuals against the stresses and strains of dehumanizing labor conditions and depressive marketing strategies—...to the extent that these practices will ultimately function to lubricate the wheels of capitalism, raising the ceiling on the level of discontent individuals can tolerate before becoming malcontent, and thus aid in the production of docile workers who are nevertheless rampant consumers, Buddhism is being tapped to contravene its very raison d’être. The question that seems to be missing from the “mind-life” approaches to Buddhism is one of whether postmodern Buddhism will be a literal opiate for the masses or else a refuge from the juggernaut onslaught of capitalism.

Controlling, Determining, and Otherwise Limiting

When a person, group, or other controlling entity seeks, struggles for, or achieves/is granted control over the conduct of another (or others), said party becomes a “governor,” in the broad sense of the term, caught up in “government,” where governmentality refers to the entire range of practices “that constitute, define, organize, and instrumentalize the strategies that individuals in their freedom can use in dealing with each other” (Foucault, Ethics. 300). In other words, in relationships that are first and foremost power relations, there are incentives, tools, and strategies for making use of whatever freedom one has in attempts at controlling, determining, or limiting the freedom of others.

Is not the standard monogamous project one that is best characterized, not as an erotic relationship nor a loving relationship, nor even a domestic partnership, but instead a relation of power? Is not the quintessential concern in the standard monogamous project the ability to control, determine, and otherwise limit the freedom of another? In a relationship where all the love, attention, affection, respect, appreciation, and on and on... in a relationship where all that one could desire from another is not only present but abundant, what need is there for governing the other’s freedom, for curtailing possibility? By what exigency or right does one find it not only acceptable but imperative to make another subject to such governance? And more pressing still, how is it not only acceptable but a normal expectation that one will leverage their very love as the strategic means for procuring such governmental power over another? Yet this is nothing more nor less than the ultimatum that people present each other with every day in pursuing “love”: submit to my governance or else I shall occlude my love for you and reject your love for me!

And just to emphasize that our approaches to love, intimacy, and family are the apotheoses of perversity, the vast majority are not satisfied with merely being granted such governance. “You must govern me in kind!  If you lack interest, even in the slightest, in taking such possession of me, your willing helot, the shallowness of your love is exposed!  If you truly loved me you'd insist on being my governor!”

After all, in this most barbaric of models, to love is to take hold of, to govern, to possess; of course, the inevitable extreme of love, then, is to consume, to devour.  Since it is a mutual and reciprocal domination, of course, the apex of love, love's culmination, is the obliteration of oneself and one's beloved.

St. Valen(trans) Day

The "trans" in Valentrans Day speaks to a "beyond" that is nothing less than the subversion of the violence that we perpetrate upon ourselves through ill-fitting conventions with which we have saddled ourselves. But to understand this, we must first understand a bit about the history of Valentine's Day...

Most of us know Valentine’s Day as the contemptible holiday alleged to be for lovers but which functions in large part to circulate insipid clichés by way of unabashed consumerism. That is, when it doesn’t function as a torturous reminder that empty gestures are still better than involuntary solitude.

The perverse pomp of Valentine’s Day, however, hides within it a certain richness of potential. Valentine’s Day was originally something more akin to Veteran’s Day: a day to commemorate martyrs. An elaborate faux history has been fabricated, circulated, edited, and enhanced to bring the day commemorating the fallen victims of murderous violence into line with rather adolescent notions of romance. These faux histories themselves have a long history. So much so, in fact, that faux history itself is nothing short of a Valentine’s tradition in its own right.

In the spirit of this tradition, I hereby proffer a more authentic faux history of Valentine’s Day:


VALENTINE'S DAY, in its original context, is a celebration of the great Gnostic teacher and mystic Saint Valentinus. Born in Egypt at the beginning of the second century (CE), Valentinus taught a sort of Eastern-influenced existentialist form of mystic Christianity. Valentinus wrote:

“God created man and man created God. So is it in the world. Men make gods and they worship their creations. If would be fitting for the gods to worship men.” (Logion 85: 1-4)

Mankind finds itself always already thrust into a painful and confusing world. So-called orthodox Christians understand this condition as a consequence of original sin; all that is ill or wrong in the world is a consequence of our disobedience to God. On this model our very existence is ineluctably plagued with guilt. Guilt is man’s fundamental burden to bear.

Valentinus, however, had a radically different notion. The problems that plague us are not rooted in our collective past insubordination but is instead a defect of creation itself. The burden of blame is not mankind’s but is God’s. This is a shocking statement, but it is important to remember that Valentinus understood that reality is something constructed by the ego. The flawed creation of God is the flawed creation of a God of our own imagination. In other words we exacerbate and compound our woe by interpreting the world and especially ourselves according to radically flawed conventions. According to Valentinus, it is not through some sort of vicarious participation in the ultimate sacrifice of God on the cross that we achieve salvation. We are saved by way of mystic processes of attaining true knowledge (gnosis) of ourselves. We are ignorant, we suffer from our ignorance, and only ignorance’s opposite, gnosis, will save us:

“Perfect redemption is the cognition itself of the ineffable greatness: for since through ignorance came about the defect . . . the whole system [kosmos] springing from ignorance is dissolved in Gnosis. Therefore Gnosis is the redemption of the inner man; and it is not of the body, for the body is corruptible; nor is it psychical, for even the soul is a product of the defect and it is a lodging to the spirit: pneuma (spirit) therefore also must be redemption itself. Through Gnosis, then, is redeemed the inner, spiritual man: so that to us suffices the Gnosis of universal being: and this is the true redemption.” (Adv. Haer. I. 21,4)

TRANS- : across, beyond, on the other side, surpassing.

Trans-scending the ill-fitting conventions that we’ve saddled ourselves with, that cause us suffering, is an act of love towards ourselves. This is the love of Saint Valentinus the Gnostic teacher. This love is a type of work: it is a process of attaining (or creating!) true knowledge (gnosis) of ourselves. This is not an easy path to salvation. The world we happen to find ourselves in thwarts true knowledge of ourselves thereby thwarting our love for ourselves. This story is not only the story of salvation told by Saint Valentinus. This is also the story of Hedwig. Thus, the trans- in Valentrans Day is one of subverting the violence we perpetrate upon ourselves by going beyond the ill-fitting conventions we have saddled ourselves with.

Those of you who know Hedwig’s story, then, know that there are few movies more suited to the authentic spirit of Valentine’s Day than Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

sexuality

Kindred to "family" as vivisected below, anything other than a cursory look at so called "sexual identity" reveals a similarly troubled coherence. Sedgwick, again:

[T]hink of all the elements that are condensed in the notion of sexual identity, something that the common sense of our time presents as a unitary [and universal!] category. Yet, exerting any pressure at all on "sexual identity," you see that its elements include

your biological (e.g., chromosomal) sex, male or female;

your self-perceived gender assignment, male or female (supposed to be the same as your biological sex);

the preponderance of your traits of personality and appearance, masculine or feminine (supposed to correspond to your sex and gender);

the biological sex of your preferred partner;

the gender assignment of your preferred partner (supposed to be the same as her/his biological sex);

the masculinity or femininity of your preferred partner (supposed to be the opposite of your own);

your self-perception as gay or straight (supposed to correspond to whether your preferred partner is your sex or the opposite);

your preferred partner's self-perception as gay or straight (supposed to be the same as yours);

your procreative choice (supposed to be yes if straight, no if gay);

your preferred sexual act(s) (supposed to be insertive if you are male or masculine, receptive if you are female or feminine);

your most eroticized sexual organs (supposed to correspond to the procreative capabilities of your sex, and to your insertive/receptive assignment);

your sexual fantasies (supposed to be highly congruent with your sexual practice, but stronger in intensity);

your main locus of emotional bonds (supposed to reside in your preferred sexual partner);

your enjoyment of power in sexual relations (supposed to be low if you are female or feminine, high if male or masculine);

the people from whom you learn about your own gender and sex (supposed to correspond to yourself in both respects);

your community of cultural and political identification (supposed to correspond to your own identity);

and—again—many more. Even this list is remarkable for the silent presumptions it has to make about a given person's sexuality, presumptions that are true only to varying degrees, and for many people not true at all: that everyone "has a sexuality," for instance, and that it is implicated with each person's sense of overall identity in similar ways; that each person's most characteristic erotic expression will be oriented toward another person and not autoerotic; that if it is alloerotic, it will be oriented toward a single partner or kind of partner at a time; that its orientation will not change over time. Normatively, as the parenthetical prescriptions in the list above suggest, it should be possible to deduce anybody's entire set of specs from the initial datum of biological sex alone—if one adds only the normative assumption that 'the biological sex of your preferred partner' will be the opposite of one's own. With or without that heterosexist assumption, though, what's striking is the number and difference of the dimensions that 'sexual identity' is supposed to organize into a seamless and univocal whole.

from Tendencies, pp. 7-8

family

In our time (now) and in our place (here), the institution of marriage is supposed to be assimilated into the institution of family, becoming its very nucleus. This institution, too, exists in a substantially, if not radically, different form than it did even prior to WWII. The failure rate of this institution is, perhaps not surprisingly, expanding nearly on pace with marriage. Though "family" is a term that has shifted and morphed through time and is something that often looked different from place to place, class to class, etc, it is, just like marriage, becoming increasingly incoherent. Consider this passage from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick:

Think of that entity "the family," an impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other:

a surname
a sexual dyad
a legal unit based on state-regulated marriage
a circuit of blood relationships
a system of companionship and succor
a building
a proscenium between "private" and "public"
an economic unit of earning and taxation
the prime site of economic consumption
the prime site of cultural consumption
a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children
a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations
a daily routine
a unit in a community of worship
a site of patriotic formation

and of course the list could go on.

from Tendencies, pg. 6

axioms

the question of why—why does the attitude towards another change as feelings for that other deepen—is actually a constellation of questions all caught up together. is it a natural transition? is it a necessary transition? what is gained in this transition? what is lost in this transition? from whence do our ideas and practices come? regardless of the answers to these questions, it seems to me that there are several interrelated outcomes of this shift that are worthy of scorn: appreciation gives way to expectation, gratitude gives way to demands and ultimatums, exploration gives way to assimilation, and perhaps most crucially, mutual respect is exchanged for mutual control. these maddening outcomes and many other aspects of contemporary monogamy are the original catalysts that led me to question why we go about things the way we do in the first place. the answers to these questions are complex where they are not elusive. I had no desire to suspend all romantic engagements until I had sufficiently grappled with these questions and so proceeded cautiously in my relationships by making use of the following axioms that I considered to be self-evident:

• the contemporary paradigm of monogamy is neither naturally arising nor necessary

• persons are ends unto themselves and should not be used as tools, as means to selfish ends

• love is other-oriented