The
Body Internal
Audio-visual lecture delivered @ The Centre For Contemporary
Photography, Melbourne, 1996 (unpublished notes)
Abstract
A total degendering and/or transgendering of the body necessitates
an indiscriminate identification with the abject morphology
of the body corporate and incorporate. Everything must be
ready to penetrate, envelop and evaginate.
The colon and its sphincter musculature is the gateway to
this bodily dimension - where body parts become body holes,
and vice versa. Rather than dwell on its scatological and
excremental design and effects, the colon is the epicentre
of the body's collapse between that which is internal and
that which is external. It fluidly shifts and shapes in
a flux between positive and negative space.
The colonic figure and its moebius spawn populate our everyday
culture. As analytic and investigative culture renders facile
and impotent any sexuality by the promotion of objects (particularly
the penile and the phallic), popular culture swells with
an overload of colonic images which suggest that the fluid
still reigns, that the body is still far from the solid,
and that objects reveal themselves through the space they
inhabit rather than through their apparent form.
Tactility
1. Possibly connect this to notions of group sex based on
cause & effect (the orgasmic chain reaction).
2. The Pygmalion myth - man breathing life into the clay
figurine.
Cosmology
1. Refer to earlier notions about violence
being at base the occupany of space and the forceful displacement
of negative space.
2.Negative space versus positive space.
a/ The penis as divining rod; the head as brain - as sensory
controller
b/ The flexible colon
c/ Excretion (the act - not the object of excerement)
d/ Bisexual/hemaphroditic worms
e/ Colonoscopies
f/ Talking through your arse
g/ Bullet tampons
h/ Rimming
i/ The muscular link between the sphincter & the penile
shaft
j/ Rendering computer graphic forms - using any dynamic
movement to 'fill in' a pre-designed skeletal structure:
making lifeforms by 'filling in' moulds
3. Discuss
different tracjectories of displacements in the confusion
of the sex act - ie. various potential tracjectories can
be triggered -
(a) physical violence - force & pressure
(b) morphological harmony - form & fit
(c) dimensional exploration - movement & space.
All the above can be related to how body parts collide,
mutate, blend, fuse, interact.
Space:
totality
1. Clara Rockman & theremin
Play opening track - talk about nature of theremin and its
'music of the air' which in fact is music conducted through
and by the body. Note Rockman's ability & extreme sensitivity
to perform the instrument. Contrast this against Jimmy Page's
use of it on WHOLE LOTTA LOVE. Discuss relation between
the theremin's oscillator tone (grounded) & Page's feedback
(overloaded)
2. Sound
Sound is the energization of space. Something moves in a
space: it displaces the atmosphere by the thing's occupancy
of that space. In its wake, the thing creates a negative
space: a vacuum where the thing once was, but which is now
filled by displaced atmosphere. Further to this, every object,
thing, surface, texture of any molecular density shudders
and quivers in response to all movement of all things responding
to the original thing that moved. Sound is the eventfullness
that reconfigures everything into jello, into vibrating
masses energized by simply being in the same space where
movement occurs. We as listeners also shudder and quiver,
from our liver to our temples to our knee bones to our chest
to our eardrums. All record the shivering change of space
as a series of atmospheric/molecular waves of expansion
and contraction; of outward pushes followed by inward sucks
of air.
3. GALL FORCE impregnation
When the male monster liquifies itself, floods a corridor
space and envelops a woman as a monstrous method of impregnation
(right down to birthing her from an unspecified hole), the
woman is experiencing the a hyper-tactile sense of space.
Just as sound makes all space quiver, this blob replaces
all space with its quivering self. The scene is an apt visualization
of how atmosphere can be rendered tactile despite its invisibility
(as in air) or its transparency (as in water).
4. Men's hip swivelling & Women's hip dislocation
Elvis is barred from swivelling his hips on TV because his
pelvic thrusts fuck the body of air around him. That air
he pushes away from him in the TV studio is then trnasmitted
into the ether and transmitted directly into the space of
America's lougerooms, where in the whole family has to make
room for his phantom dick. The TV stations who barred Elvis
from the waist down were not stupid. They knew the power
of the penis when it is used to occupy space in the act
of thrusting. Male plevic construction is designed like
an uncanny sex machine to thrust up and inward. Female pelvic
construction repels the inital shock wave 9 months later,
thrusting down and out to expel the baby. The space between
the sex act and the birth action are macrocosmically aligned
to the smallest sound wave which pushes air forward and
sucks air back.
5. Dildos & boxing
Vibrations - a mix of the sonic and the physical - can be
used as sensual stimuli for both men and women. But whereas
a woman, for example, can employ a vibrator against her
body, focusing small vibrations at a high rate concentrated
at a small surface area of her flesh, men grotesquely amplify
this into something like boxing. In boxing, men are stimulated
by massive vibrations at a much slower rate (one shock wave
every 3 seconds or so) which rack their whole body. The
effect is ultimately the same - a rush, a surge, a wave
of energy - at the same ratio formula, but at different
degrees of intensity. For women, tactility can be directed
inwardly; for men, tactility has to attack them.
5. THE ENTITY
Scene where main rape occurs. The invisible man marks his
presence through pressure - not mere tactility. Her body
renders his force through a landscape of bruises and pressured
points.
Space:
territory
1. Sport
A man stands holding a ball. He wants to throw the ball
in the air to some other point. He plots the balls trajectory
in his mind, then uses brain-muscle-bone interfacing to
execute the action. The ball follows his imagined flight;
its trajectory draws an energy line that records the propulsion
and explusion of the ball. The ball is never separate from
the man - it is always the tail end of the recoding process
of the energy line. Its invisibility is of no consequence;
but its territorialization of the space with its invisible
energy line is of prime importance. The ball in flight is
part ejaculation, part birthing of a son: see that ball
soaring high in the eksy? that's me; that's my seed; that's
my son. Go, boy, go! People who dislike sport cannot see
what sports lovers see: a mass of phantom energy lines which
record the projectile journeys of men. For sports lovers
specifically and men generally, all space carries the potential
for marking - the potential for being traversed, entered,
penetrated, ruptured.
2. Beams of energy in anime
In much Japanese animation, energy lines are visualized
as streams of light, beams of energy and concentric circles
and bubbles of explosive power.
3. The internet
The internet as a chart of ejaculation, like the British
airway image & the Overfiend image of white lines covering
the globe. Another instance of territory governed by urinary
disperision under the guise of phantom powere weilded by
sperm ejaculation (seeding & reaping the crop, etc.).
4. Urine
There is a thin line between sperm/ejaculation and urine/urination.
In the COLDIE beer ad, an ominous factory comes to life
to make beer and shower mankind. The factory is a body-machine,
forged and maintained, building pressure until all energy
erupts uncontrollably to produce the liquid lifeforce. The
history of consumptives directed at men is based on a confusion
between urination & ejaculation - between a steaming
release of residual liquified energy and a chilled intake
of liquid energy. The COLDIE ad is almost indistinguishable
from the NUTRA GRAIN cereal ad and its fetishization of
the iron man. Both feature energy build-ups (the sensory
erection) which explode (the cum shot). In reality, ejeculation
can never be controlled. In pornography, the cum shot is
mere eveidence that someone came, but usually the event
is haphazard, awkward and remarkably undynamic. Men can
'cum' better with any other part of their body than their
penis, hence the encyclopedia of sexual sublimation which
drives men. At the base of men is a sublime confusion between
urinating and ejeculating.
Erection:
the act
1. Public indecent exposure
Seeing guy wanking off at passing car in public - literally
fucking the whole world. The space, the air, into which
he fucks is the abstract carrier of his action, with the
penis being the agent of the action. It follows that if
the action is an urge or a compulsion, than it becomes possibly
irrelevant into what the penis is inserted.
2. Air-guitars & air-penis
3. The urban landscape of skyscrapers
4. Horripilation
Reference the original HORRALITY article & the notion
of 'erect hair' being related to adrenalin rushes.
5. NEMESIS
An erect eyeball!
Erection:
the form
1. Swelling of body parts
Erection - think of the various body parts whose general
structural shape becomes erect, eg. hair, nipples, lips,
labials, anus. Mostly, they change shape & morph due
to an engorging of blood - a swelling of intensity as blood
is pumped to the body zone being triggered at that point
in time. The rush of blood is the primary fluid flow which
precedes secretion. The general yet vague notion of 'erection'
is itself phallocentric: it severs the penile in an attempt
to prove its central power to manifestations of sexuality
and the maintenance of sex. Anything can become erect.
2. Muscular tensing
Body builders achieve total body erection by the rendering
of the penile across their skin - stretching their form
so that veins are brought to the surface, ready to have
the internal fluid lines of lifeblood erupt and spurt in
an ejaculative orgy. The body builder is an inverse vampire:
he/she makes their body ripe, full, voluminous, vital.
3. Vampires
Vampires could be posited as devourers of the internal:
they are erotically invoked by internal proceedings. To
them, the body of a victim is visually the encasing of the
internal fluids whose rush is transformed to a gush directly
into their mouths. This is the precise sexuality of the
vampire - a being who connects to and thrives on internal
life.
4. UNIVERSAL SOLDIER final battle
The
Womb: disclosed
1. Soccer
Men kick the ball across a territorialized terrain. Each
man is a sperm cell, wanting to thrust his sperm head into
the surface of the egg, to penetrate the skin of the egg.
That surface is the net - a membraneous tissue which captures
a holds (via lodged scores) the successful speam head. This
success is displaced into the uterine shell which is the
stadium - covered with humans who - thus triggered - now
function as tactile surface tissue, highly sensitive to
the contraction and expansion of the egg's membraneous net.
2. Henry Moore
Moore's depiction of women is in perfect line with most
modernist male artists and their closest brethren, serial
sex murderers. Moore's scultpure depict women's core life
zones as vacant space: his walrus-like figures spill themselves
onto podia like frozen insides of a larva lamp. The fluid
shape is rendered hard, tough, fixed. The vacant spaces
are body holes where wombs should be. He excavates their
internals, the end-result of his pursuit of form. Many sex
murderers gut their victims in similar playful ways, creatively
reshaping, reforming, re-inventing the external and internal
body. Either Moore & his ilk are guilty of this impulse,
or sex murderers are artistic for acting on this impulse.
(Further reading THE BLOOD OF JACKSON POLLOCK & THE
CORPSE OF MODERNISM.)
3. Women throwing clay
What is the attraction clay holds for women? Is it an invented
domestic lifestyle cliche or is there something else at
stake? Picture the spinning wheel; picture the blob of wet
earth centred as the circular planar lines rotate and ground
the lump in place through centrigugal force. Now picture
the slow shaping ofthe form upward in a waving, spiralling,
circling motion. The shape changes its dynamics, the result
of pressure placed against it by hands, and held together
by the concentric dynamo of the spinning disc. Now turn
the whole thing upside down. We are not in Hades, where
all that is unholy is reversed: we have warped from the
dimension of women - thousands of them with mud on their
faces, scarves tying back their hair, and hot cups of Mawell
house coffee nearby - into the dimension of men.
4. Men throwing stones in water
In this dimenension of men - thousands of them with sweat
on their brow, vague warrior affectations connoted by their
hair cuts, and cold tins of Fosters Light nearby - they
all stand by a big pond. And into the ponf they throw stones.
Again and again and again. They are drawn to the still water
not to see their reflection (they're all ugly, and besides,
they all think they're gods despite their looks) but because
the water is undisturbed. Still. Virgin. They want to fuck
it. They want to stick their dick in it because it's there.
They impregnate the water's stillness by throwing stones
in. The stones sink to the bottom, pushing the water mass
out of the stones' descending trajectory in a waving, spiralling,
circling motion. This is the negative spatialization of
the woman's erective form. Her shape is positive and internally
energized by the spinning disc; his shape is negative and
externally energizes the water in a series of expanding
& contracting rings.
The
Womb: disembodied
1. FIGHT! ICZER-ONE
A young woman from a female-only planet is engaged as a
fighter to control a robotic giant exo-skeleton which requires
her to operate it using the psychic energy of a school girl.
The school girl is held in a proto-embyonic state, floating
in a fluid womb which telepathically control's the external
robot's mechanisms, which in turn are maintained and navigated
by the extra-terristal woman. Such scenes serve to visualize
consciousness as a centralized organ floating in liquid
- like the brain in saline, the embryo in ambiotic fluid,
the human in water. Centring, grounding, floating are all
ways in which one can become one with oneself. When one
dislocates oneself from all external stimuli, one then attains
equilibrium. The impulse to immerse oneself is only laterally
a 'return to the womb'. More directly, it is the freeing
of oneself from gravity, air, sound; the negation of the
surface of one's skin as the connecting tissue to the external
world, for if you can decrease your sense of external touch
- such as what happens when you are immersed in water -
then your sense of tactility is spread evenly between your
outer and inner states. Under such a controlled environment,
you do not return to a womb: you become one.
2. Hi-tech modern car ads
Cars in such ads are governed by key consistent principles:
(a) the driver is not visible; (b) the production/design/creation
of the car is not evident (ie. the car just 'happens'; and
(c) the motion and space of the travelling vehicle is displaced
from its reality (ie. it cruises as if there is neither
ground nor gravity). This is because cars are wombic modules:
they create a sense of motion while staying still; (b) they
displace all audio-visual experience into secondary and
filtered perceptual domains (things flash by in silence,
etc.); and (c) a low frequency rumble replicates the uterine
sensurround of body noise in which we acosutically bathe
for numerous months prior to becoming ariated and oxideized
by the outside world. For these reasons of solitary comfort,
cars will continue until the planet is destroyed.
3. Obesity
The body as it own dimension of self-serving tactility -
ie. one's very density becomes the sole and exclusive means
by which one measures contact with all other space and dimensionality.
The role of fat in the body - the layering and lining between
organs, muscles and so on - is replicated as an outer social
soft-shell. The internal body becomes a womb by being enclosed
within a fat lining.
4. METAL FIGHTERS MIKU
Teen girls' bodies encased in hysterical exo-skeletons designed
to increase their power. Their womanhood is encased within
man-made power forms, remaking them as transsexual machines.
They are re-wombed by man-made machinic apparrell.
5. STARGATE preparations for probe
Just like the stone the goes into the pond - or the body
of Ed Harris descending to oceanic depths in THE ABYSS,
or the body of any number of cinematic astronauts becoming
lost in space as their life-line is severed - all disective/trajectorial
lines of entry are based on probing that which does not
reveal its depths. What's inside a girl? Call up your probe.
What's on the ocean floor? Call up your probe. What's behind
a vertical liquid wall? Call up your probe. All these probes
of course are remote sensory mechanisms. If only a man's
dick had eyes he could tell what's inside a girl. For now,
soundings and scopic needles will have to do. The trick
is to keep the body whole and together while you do the
probe - otherwise you're conducting mere forensic analysis.
All dimensional exploration is dick-oriented. Less attention
should be spent on the what and who of the dick, and more
focus given to the where. Not who has a dick, but where
does the dick go.
The
Colon: positive
1. STARGATE opening
The liquid colon - the fluid membrane between any two spaces;
the dimensional barrier between any two dimensions. The
swaying of physical and architectural laws. (Note architecture
as the metaphorical language of stasis and solidity - hence
its fixation on the skeletal and its covering. Note the
broad social distinction between the male architect and
the femal interior designer.)
2. CORNFLAKES bunjee jump
Guy drops his colon on death trip through the giant colon
of life. By eating cornflakes, he becomes excrement - a
regurgitation of himself. He is both whole and part; both
an external form and an internal body; both outside of himself
& inside himself.
3. Steam locomotion trains
The
Colon: negative
1. STARGATE dimensional journey
2. Plastic extrusion
Morphology:
internal
1. Hans Arp
Inside out scultptures - the external form is actually the
covering to an invisible form, internally held in place
by the outer form.
2. GHOST clay scene
Scene where Swayzee humps Moore while she makes a clay jug.
The soon-to-be invisible man transmits tactility to the
physical woman. He gets her to shape his penile shaft so
that she externally experiences the internal sensation.
In doing so, her hands shape a form thatis both internal
& external: it is a rendering of the penile as well
as a casting of the colon. She is effectively evaginating
the penis, hollowing it out. In the sex act, internal &
external fuse as space becomes form and form becomes space.
3. Fist-fucking
There are 2 ways to view fist-fucking. One is as an act
of invisibilty, a sleight of hand (ie. where did it go?).
The other is as an act of transmogrification, wherein the
hand/arm becomes an engorged penile shaft & head which
inturn becomes a physical materialization of the colonic
path. This becoming - this occupancy of internal space -
is neither hetero, bi or homo-sexual: it is polysexual,
ambisexual and transsexual. It - like most penetrative sex
acts - is driven be an impulse to be encased, enclosed,
embodied.
4. DARK WARRIOR
Final fight scene
3. Sex change operations
In male-to-female operations - blithely referred to as 'cut
& tucks' - the penile shaft is split in two, then the
two sides are wedged apart, trimmed, then shaped into split
vaginal lips. The testicles are removed. This design literally
turns the phallic inside-out, right down to attempting to
have the nerves within the penis be redistributed within
the new psuedo-labial lips so that tactility can be reinterpreted
as pseudo-orogenous sensation.
Morphology:
external
1. Plastic surgery
The free-form (literally) transmogrification of body parts,
wherein any body part can be part of or the whole of itself
and/or another body part in whole or part. Stretches of
buttock skin can become forehead flesh, replacing scarred
tissue with fresh surface. Slices of low-usage back muscle
can be excerpted and placed wherever muscular action is
required. Bits of bone and cartlidge - held in place by
mere genetic patterning - can be realigned to sugest a new
internal structure. The body's internal structure and external
covering can be viewed as the potential for the becoming
of any other body. One's shape therfore becomes megamorphic:
a shaped container of possible variations of the container's
shape.
2. Sex parts and sexes
Gender difference - be it angels, cabbage patch pumpkins,
drugs or chromosones, it doesn't matter - is the execution
of a particular option of sexual engendering. A girl? The
biomorph contains a thin tunnelling path which leads to
two embedded ovaries. A boy? The biomorph emits a thin protruding
rod with leads to two testicles. You want a girl instead?
turn the rod and testicels inside out. You want a boy instead
of a girl? turn the path and ovaries inside out. One is
the reverse image of he other; each is the posative of the
other's negative; each is the cast ot the other's mold,
which is the mold of the other's cast, ad infinitum. Sexual
difference is meaningless in the face of this morphological
flux, wherein there is no lack, no surplus, and only the
3 . BIG CLIT magazine & SM testicle video
4 . KOYANISQUATSI time lapse traffic
Time lapse photography which reveals the city to be an urban
heart, with traffic as the corpuscles of blood flowing along
the highway veins, i]linking the city centre via arerials.
5 . Boys squashing bugs
