Anus Utopia

The Peach Blossom Spring

In the year of Taiyuan of the Jin Dynasty, there lived a man in Wuling jun who earned his living by fishing. One day, he rowed his boat along a stream, unaware of how far he had gone when all of a sudden, he found himself in the midst of a wood full of peach blossoms. The wood extended several hundred footsteps along both banks of the stream. There were no trees of other kinds. The lush grass was fresh and beautiful and peach petals fell in riotous profusion. The fisherman was so curious that he rowed on, in hopes of discovering where the trees ended.

At the end of the wood was the fountainhead of the stream. The fisherman beheld a hill, with a small opening from which issued a glimmer of light. He stepped ashore to explore the crevice. His first steps took him into a passage that accommodated only the width of one person. After he progressed about scores of paces, it suddenly widened into an open field. The land was flat and spacious. There were houses arranged in good order with fertile fields, beautiful ponds, bamboo groves, mulberry trees and paths crisscrossing the fields in all directions. The crowing of cocks and the barking of dogs were within everyone's earshot. In the fields the villagers were busy with farm work. Men and women were dressed like people outside. They all, old and young, appeared happy.

They were surprised at seeing the fisherman, who, being asked where he came from, answered their every question. Then they invited him to visit their homes, killed chickens, and served wine to entertain him. As the words of his arrival spread, the entire village turned out to greet him. They told him that their ancestors had come to this isolated haven, bringing their families and the village people, to escape from the turmoil during the Qin Dynasty and that from then onwards, they had been cut off from the outside world. They were curious to know what dynasty it was now. They did not know the Han Dynasty, not to mention the Wei and the Jin dynasties. The fisherman told them all the things they wanted to know. They sighed. The villagers offered him one feast after another. They entertained him with wine and delicious food. After several days, the fisherman took his leave. The village people entreated him not to let others know of their existence.

Once out, the fisherman found his boat and rowed homeward, leaving marks all the way. When he came back to the jun, he reported his adventure to the prefect, who immediately sent people to look for the place, with the fisherman as a guide. However, the marks he had left could no longer be found. They got lost and could not find the way.

Liu Ziji of Nanyang jun , a learned scholar of high repute, was excited when he heard the fisherman's story. He devised a plan to find the village, but it was not carried out. Liu died soon afterwards, and after his death, no one else made any attempt to find it.

Anal Terror

Last Chapter: Anal Utopia

According to Paul Preciado in an essay called ‘Anal Terror’, patriarchal capitalism could only emerge through a centuries-long process of ‘anal castration’: the denial (sealing-up) of any orifice that cannot be reduced to sexual or reproductive functions – especially the orifice through which bodily compost exits our bodies enters the earth. That is, the anus. In another historical process of corporeal enclosure, ‘It was necessary to close up the anus to sublimate pansexual desire, transforming it into the social bond, just as it was necessary to enclose the commons to mark out private property,’ writes Preciado. ‘To close up the anus so that the sexual energy that could flow through it would become honorable and healthy male camaraderie, linguistic exchange, communication, media, advertising, and capital.’ Borrowing Hyde’s terms, to close the anus is to restrict the movement of the gift, which accrues rather than loses value as it exits the body and becomes independent of the self.

With the concept of anal castration, Preciado asks where desire and life emerge. The anus is threatening precisely because it is sexy and productive – even reproductive, if shit is understood as manure from which new life grows. Yet that new life is not, at least in the first stage, human life. The worldview required to un-castrate the anus, to reach toward an ‘anal utopia,’ as Preciado has it, would require one to consider nonhuman species as part of an ecosystem in which shit is essential food rather than toxic waste. ‘The community of closed anuses is shored up with dumb columns made of families, with their anally-castrated-father and their hollow-viscera-mother . . . The kids with castrated anuses built a community they called City, State, Nation.’ This community is limited not only to those whose anuses are closed but to those who see the telos of all life as capital production and biological reproduction.

Where would all that erotic energy go to, in the anal utopia? If all orifices were understood to be potentially erotic – the nostrils, the pores of the skin – and all orifices were seen as (re)productive? If productivity was besides the point? If bodies did not have ‘outsides and insides, marking zones of privilege and abject zones’? If desire were not seen as ‘a reserve of truth’ but rather as ‘an artifact that is culturally constructed, modeled by social violence, incentives and rewards, but also by fear of exclusion’? If desire were no longer a marker of identity, by which one is made queer or femme or whatever else? If desire were instead seen as ‘an arbitrary slice of an uninterrupted and polyvocal flow’? If interpenetration were understood as a constant fact rather than a means to a reproductive end? Erotic energy could be made political by being made ecological.

Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis, author of Full Surrogacy Now, reaches toward anal utopia through the concept of surrogate gestation. She begins by calling the work of gestation what it is: labor, and then asks how that labor could be distributed beyond the family unit, abolishing the family unit and its teleology in the process. In an interview, Lewis says: ‘If everything is surrogacy, the whole question of original or “natural” relationships falls by the wayside. In that sense, what surrogacy means is standing in for one another, caring for one another, making one another. It’s a word to describe the very actual but also utopian fact that we are the makers of one another, and we can learn to act like it.’ We are the makers of one another, and also the makers and the products of trillions of other species – we gestate and are gestated by them. We co-create the atmosphere, and we can learn to act like it.

Related:

1. THE ONTOLOGY OF THE COUPLE or, What Queer Theory Knows about Numbers
2. Homosexual Desire - Guy Hocquenghem
3. Was there something queer about May 68?: The FHAR and Guy Hocquenghem
4. This Compost: Erotics of Rot - Elvia Wilk
5. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/guy-hocquenghem-volutions
6. http://archivesautonomies.org/IMG/pdf/homosexualites/rapport-contre-la-normalite.pdf

Writing

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