Jonathan's Eye Project

MyAnuSpace

Intro

An encounter between experimental film, queer theory, pornography, and science fiction.

This is a study of how relationships, represented by parts of the body, transform and restructure the context of the social and language. It is a work that started out as a question about whether the butt has the political potential to re-bind us together in a time of confusion with big and small wars. It is a work expressing the subjective and liberating potential of the anus, from the utopia represented in the Chinese story The Peach Blossom Spring to Paul B. Preciado's book Terror Anal, about the anus as a post-gendered organ.

I will study the symbolic meaning of queer and feminism that anal has, which is a democratic symbol representing all regardless of sex and gender, the sexual communist symbol of the public joy that we all experienced, the symbol of the liquidity of power from behind and from below and the various symbolic meanings of the anus.

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Research

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

Task

1. Write Auto-fictional Poetry about the anus (based on Anal Terror).
2. Designing aliens (based on the anus) and backgrounds (based on The Peach Blossom Spring and other stories).
3. Reading poems together to dub.

Auto-fictional Poetry

Reference

• Viral Poems - Pedro Neves Marques
• A New New Age - Pedro Neves Marques

Outcome

Version 1

Designing Aliens

Reference

• Exotourisme, Don’t pretend We are so Special - Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
• 'Alienarium 5' - Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
• If AI were Cephalopod - 0(rphan)d(rift>)
• The Levitating Perils - Wang Yefeng
• BIRDS Volume II - Slow Spectre  (2021)

Designing Backgrounds

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