Anus Utopia

Anal Terror

Anal Utopia

The first days of the revolution were not many, but they taught us some lessons. Here they are; these are some (only some) of the surprises that the collective use of the anus affords. Revolutionary anal virtues, one could say, were it not for the risk of seeing them transformed into Anal Facebook or MyAnuSpace.

The anus has neither sex nor gender; like the hand, it escapes the rhetoric of sexual difference. Situated in the rear and inferior part of the body, the anus also erases the personalizing and privatizing differences of the face. The anus challenges the logic of identification of the masculine and the feminine. There is no division of the world into two. The anus is a post-identitarian organ: "Any social use of the anus, apart from its sublimated use, creates the risk of the loss of identity" (101). Rejecting sexual difference and the anthropomorphic logic of the face and the genital, the anus (and its other extreme, the mouth) establishes the basis for inalienable sexual equality: everybody (human or animal) is first and above all an anus. Neither penis nor vagina, but oral-anal tube. On the horizon of the post-human sexual democracy is the anus, as the orgasmic cavity and receptive non-reproductive muscle, shared by all.

The anus is a bioport. This is not simply about a symbol or a metaphor; it is an insertion port through which a body is open and exposed to another or others. It is that portal dimension that demands, for the masculine heterosexual body, anal castration: everything that is socially feminine could enter and pollute the masculine body through the anus, leaving uncovered his status as equal to any other body. The presence of the anus (even a castrated one) in a body with a biopenetrator dissolves the opposition between hetero and homosexual, between active and passive, penetrator and penetrated. It displaces sexuality from the penetrating penis to the receptive anus, thus erasing the segregative lines of gender, sex, and sexuality.

The anus functions as the zero point from which an operation of deterritorialization of the heterosexual body could begin, or, in other words, of the degenitalization of sexuality reduced to penis-vagina penetration. It's not about making the anus into a new center, but rather setting into motion a process of de-hierarchization and decentralization that would make of any other organ, orifice, or pore, a possible anal bioport. Thus a set of practices unfolds here that are irreducible to masculine/ feminine, homo/ hetero identities: enemas, dilation, lubrication, penetration with the tongue, fist, or dildo ... The anal machine rises up before the heterosexual machine. The non-hierarchical connection of the organs, the public redistribution of pleasure, and the communization of the anus all announce a "sexual communism" (111) to come.

Historically the anus has been contained as an abject organ, never clean enough, never quiet enough. It neither is nor can be politically correct. The anus does not produce, or rather it only produces trash, detritus. No production of profits or surplus value may be expected of this organ: neither sperm nor egg nor sexual reproduction. Only shit. It is the exalted place of ecological non-production. Or better, the escape hatch through which capital may escape and return to the earth, turned into humus. Although it is imaginable for the strategies of capital production to eventually reterritorialize anal pleasure, they would have to be ready to be transformed into shit.

Non-reappropriable organs (bio as well as techno prostheses) in heterosexual libidinal economy are anal: dildos, nasal and oral orifices, implants, preexisting cuts or hollows or those produced with the intention of being penetrated. The vagina that does not procreate, that is extracted from the heterosexual machine, ceases to be a "hollow viscera" that tries to get "filled up" to become rather an organ with anal characteristics. Thus Monique Wittig's expression: "Lesbians do not have vaginas." In the same way, from a strictly biopolitical point of view, and within the economy of the sexual reproduction of the species, fags do not have penises, because they do not penetrate vaginas (but rather anuses, mouths...) All that's left is for me to wish you the best: Communize your anus. The weapon is modest, but the possibility of action is close by-and infinite.

Erotic of rotting

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.

Zero

the last number invented

here I am, just an anus.

an insertion ports

the invisible garden

the corner of our cruising

the unlit room in the club

becoming flowers and wild boars

making love with Arabs

May '68 taught us to read the writing on the walls

there is no wine, candles, or roses

but everything flourishing in the darkness

the negative space of being

I am the moon, shadow, passivity.

I am female, African, Middle Eastern, underclass, terrorist.

put a pencil in the hand of a masturbator

Couples are the greatest violence and empire.

I refuse - the silent tango comes to an abrupt halt.

happy (not) together

between being and (non) being

(non) definition

(non) future

(non) ontological position

between zero and one

before fiat lux

before language

before senses

before the before

before after fiat lux

before after that before

no vagina

no penis

hole

whole

Output Writing Version 2

Three presences:

Andere (shaman), B, Z

As Venus shines brightest in the sky,

Homo sapiens struggle to survive on a dying Earth

that increasingly resembles the toxic atmosphere of Venus,

dreaming of flourishing again by mutating into post-humans.

Shaman Andere performs rituals to

allow endangered sea anemones to invade human bodies

Andere (shaman) :

Welcome all the new world workers, masturbate!

To make the walls sing.

To dance, to laugh, to celebrate!

no heterosexual tightly closed doors here,

only a multidimensional space

without any bony edges,

There is no subject here,

we are left to our uninterrupted passions,

we love a pulsating life,

that tingles and swells,

only with a bio-port that

to eat and excrete,

eternally sinking and rising,

a longing, never be silenced,

metamorphose and reproduce with light energy,

into the peach-blossoming night forest,

the endless poisonous purple mists,

we begin to grow fluid,

making our stretching skin bleed,

mixed with our menstrual blood, pre-cum, saliva, urine,

succulent, toxic humans,

translucent tentacles,

dissolving in the environment,

fragile, sickly, somnambulistic, and clingy,

paradise is rotting,

our fates look at us,

long since lost our sight，

back before language,

tentacles cling to each other,

no longer distinguish each other's shapes,

the universe is promiscuous,

desire is blind,

swing to the disco with the darkness of the cosmic dimension,

we no longer fear,

breathing is reproductive,

it births the atmosphere,

shit is reproductive,

it births the atmosphere,

dying is reproductive,

it births the atmosphere.

B:

I am destined to disappear,

dis/appear,

destined to perish in another.

put this moment in the can,

I love you,

for ten thousand years.

Z:

Never am I alone.

Many who lived before me

and made efforts before me

were weaving

weaving

on my being.

And if I now sit down beside you

and quietly say: I suffered

do you hear?

who knows,

who is murmuring