Unchaining Bodies

!1 University of Amsterdam - Graduate School of Humanities Unchaining Bodies Rethinking Sexuality and Desire in Bodily Orientations to Food By Alex Yletyinen June 2015 Prof. Mireille Rosello !2 Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………….……4 1) Causal Bodies……………………………………………………...8 Soup for Dinner……………………………………………… Bodies of Myth……………………………………………….. Thingy Bodies………………………………………………... 2) The Body-Politics of a Business Dinner……………………..…..24 De-threading Body Events…………………………………… American Psycho or Dido?…………………………………... Murky Red Substance………………………………………… Silk Gloves…………………………………………………… “Chicks Restaurant”………………………………………… Cocaine Facilities……………………………………………. 3) Desiring Affectivity; A Bodily Experiment with the Virtual……..43 The Hetero-Project……………………………………………. Desiring The Virtual…………………………………………... “Accidentally Falling into Feederism”………………………. Conditional Desire……………………………………………. Unconditional Desiring-Machines……………………………. An Unruly Machine…………………………………………… The Dithering Mouth………………………………………….. Conclusion……………………………………………………………..……61 Bibliography………………………………………………………………..66 !3 After centuries of seeing sex as impure, heterosexuality is the ultimate naturalisation of cul- turally sanctioned sex acts.1 1 Terre Thaemlitz, writer on gender identity and an electronic artists, at the Rietveld Academie of Art, Amsterdam, 2009 !4 Introduction If we give up the effective subject, we also give up the object upon which effects are produced. Duration, identity with itself, being are inherent neither in that which is called subject nor in that which is called object: they are complexes of events apparently durable in comparisons with other complexes - e.g., through the difference in tempo of the event. (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1968, 298) The binary oppositions of nature and culture, and of the human and non-human, have remained firmly at the foundation of continental philosophy since the 17th century. In 1637, when the proclamation of the subject was made by Descartes, by virtue of cogito ergo sum, an absolute was defined. This absolute - which quickly became the foundation of all knowledge - not only penetrat- ed thought, but also established scientific reasoning. Facts were established. This rationale has been the driving force separating, and distinguishing, human consciousness from all else uncon- scious. Namely, from the material world of things, stuff such as food, non-human actors, animal and alien bodies. Now, the external world could be discovered via the human subject’s privileged position in the universe. Science was to ‘make sense of’ those ‘thinking subjects,’ at the top of the food- chain. To this, sexuality became an attribute of biology. One was to be born into a category of either minority or majority. Simultaneously, this Cartesian dualism decided the fate of the material world, for all beings; it is to remain independent from the mind, something unknowable and only possible to experience as phenomena. Descartes assertion created an irreconcilable difference between thinking and acting, and this has remained the governing principle by which the human is considered in relation to itself and other all other bodies. This strict anthropocentrism only accelerated in the Victorian period, and, not only registered human subjects distinct from other animal bodies, but also created differentiations !5 of and within, the very human body. Male, female, homosexual and heterosexual, are essentially rationalising categories of bodies. Or at least attempts of a rationalising. This sort of pre-emptive classification of bodies, for me, spells a perilous presupposition which I wish to here re-think. If all experience is simply phenomena and thus only perceptible, then should the material world bare any affects on the body? Or vice versa, if this is the case, should bodily affectivity bare any causal potentials in material conditions? If the world indeed is composed merely of perceptible phenomena, one might suggest that bodies are effective when they so ‘choose,’ and therefore are prone to a stable subject, or rather mind. This would indeed also suggest becoming-minority bodies, is ultimately a choice. Are we then to assume that one simply chooses to be homosexual, bisexual or transgendered? Or the very ambiguous category of a woman? To concur with Nietzsche above, the effective subject who would make that choice, is no longer. Or indeed, never existed. This compels me to turn away from these ‘ratio- nalised bodies,’ to the complexes of events as Nietzsche (1968, 298) suggests. It is these intimate affairs and occurrences which matter, in constituting affective relations between the two previously considered independent entities (Subject and object). What interests me are deterritorialised relations, those which do not compromise for heteronormativity for example. These relations are the mediatory facilitators of becoming-bodies. They are intensities which register in bodies as, what Deleuze calls in The Logic of Sense (orig.1969, 1990), sensory representations or denotations. The event of relations, or complexes I will be focusing on, are those between bodies and food. More specifically; the material foldings and affective flows, which a relationality between food and body negotiates. When a body eats, drinks, seduces and fucks, it is - I will argue - merely folding the ‘outside world’ into a performative capacity. Or into an actualisable potential. These potentials are !6 limitless, and by default therefore, it seems myopic and deterministic to think of the body as limited to the capacities of the mind. It is our minds that need our bodies, not vice versa. That is to say that; in order for an eating and a seducing-body to be actualised, in order for these events to become bodily, a folding of eating, seducing and the intensities of affect and sensation immanent to eating and seducing, must occur. This relational re-thinking of human bodies, allows for more creative potentials to become bodily potentials. What ensues is essentially an opening up of creative avenues. These avenues do not confine an object or an event strictly as x or as y, but instead consider the affective materialities between objects and subjects, as events which ontologically make each other. It would be rash to announce that what is effectively at stake here is humanity itself. Though this is not entirely false, it is more so the relations by which being human is made possible that I wish to de-thread. The materiality or relation which I see as opportune for such a de-treading, is that between the body and food. In an anti-humanist manner, I do not wish to consider the mind and body as two distinct machines. Instead the two are causal of the external world, extensions of it. But it is the body which actualises its physical modal potential. The body is an active modality which ex- tends the real world, so as for the subject to be able to speak of a reality. To echo Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s re-formulation of the Spinozist question; we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into compo- sition with other affects, with the affects of another body (1987, 257) I will attempt here to release the human subject, or the effective subject, from it’s entrenched Fol- lowing the thought of Nietzsche (1968), Deleuze & Guattari (1977, 1983, 1987, 1993) and Michel Foucault (1968, 1982, 1985), as well as drawing from Donna Haraway (1989) and Bruno Latour (1993), I will suggest that indeed the material world is not unknowable to us. It is instead imminent to a ‘human subject’ being-in-the-world. I will take as my objects two scenes from respective films !7 - Italian cult film Miseria e Nobilita (1954) and the more recent American Psycho (2000), - and a ‘deviant’ sexual preference some might refer to as a “fetish”, but will here be referred to as feederism. The purpose of my analysis is to think about bodies, their representations and becomings, together with these artefacts. Further, I wish to due away with the illusionary singularity of an object and with a politics of certainty. Food provides an excellent relational object to do away with such a politics, as it is so diverse yet its assumed function is singular; to saturate. To echo Sara Ahmed (2006) let us remain sceptical of concrete events, such as that of saturation, or of events in general with one created and assumed orientation. This relative outlook to being human has the significant benefit of not presuming that there exists one orientation, which conditions being human-in-the-world. For, what is it to be human anyway? As non-intentional beings (Haraway 2013), that question might obtain as many answers as there are human bodies. However, it most likely might not. Why is that? What is that animates, vitalise and breathes life into a human body? A cosmological order which harmoniously structures the world? Perhaps, but as I’am inclined to accept Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “the death of God”, this seems unlikely. Instead, I wish to suggest that it is the material world, engulfed with bodies and objects with various intestines, sensations and affective properties which animates us. These bodies are imminent, as they form when any two forces come in contain with one another. That is to say that biological, as well as political relations constitute bodies. These bodies and objects can be thought of as multiplicities of ‘forces of demand’. Demands of the ‘subject’, of the constitutive relations and associations. These demands are also those which locate human bodies on lines of orientation. So than, let us explore these lines and how they break, re-form and re-connect with other forces, for example at the dinner table or on a third date. !8 Chapter 1) Causal Bodies Simply put, food moves about all the time. It constantly shifts registers: from the sacred to the everyday, from metaphor to materiality, it is the most common and elusive of matters (Probyn, 1999, 217) Accepting Elspeth Probyn’s position on food is not a necessarily radical affirmation, but it is all the more indispensable.

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