Unchaining Bodies

University of Amsterdam - Graduate School of Humanities

Unchaining Bodies

Rethinking Sexuality and Desire in Bodily Orientations to Food

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 unconscious. 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 ‘rationalised 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 extends 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 composition 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. Indeed, my position in this first chapter, follows a very similar trajectory to that of Probyn. Here, food as an expressive negotiation, makes and marks an event. This event, I will come to suggest, is the further negotiation between human and non-human actants. Dinner is this negotiation. It is not grounded in a singular politics, social organising or cultural endowment.

However, we should avoid naively assuming that all which is to be learned - i.e. what this or that dinner can tell us about our bodies - is to be learned from an event. On the contrary, let us consider that which is not told, those bodies for whom an object does not stand. This is to say, let us remain sceptical of concrete points of orientation (Ahmed, 2006, 545). I do not want to be shown a subject, told an object and thus informed of the real. We should attempt at creating the real for ourselves!

To do this, I suggest shifting our focus away from a phenomenological stance on objects. That is, distance thought assumptions from meditations that take objects as existing, as created, in a plane of externality. In a plane which is distinct from consciousness. Instead, lets consider a human ontology in which objects rhizomatically2 assemble, morph and orient our bodies. Objects accompany us, in

2 The concept of a rhizome is introduced by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, as something which “ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (1987, 7). Thus when thinking of human ontology as rhizomatic, we are invited to turn singularities into multiplicities, traverse points and positions and assume lines, flows and trajectories. Thus life - be it human or non human - can be envisioned as ‘playing out’ on a rhizomatic plane, where no concrete events or points of orientation can be fixed, for the line is constantly in flux and moving at varying intensities. 9 our points or planes of orientation. These orientations are not only relational to and for a subject, constituting a body of affectivity. But more so, such a body has the capacity to affect, and, also the capacity to be affected. In considering such an ontological re-positioning, our orientations can better be described as forces of demands. These forces are what constitute and segment subjective embodiment. I am not here speaking of a Cartesian, thinking subject. On the contrary, such an embodiment

- or rather body-orientation - should be viewed here in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, as a collective assemblage of enunciation (1987, 7).

In order to think about body-orientations in the context not only of food, but dinner, I want to here discuss a scene from the Italian cult comedy Miseria e Nobilita (1954). What is to be said about the corporeal materiality between dinner and the diners? It is all to be found in the event, in the systems of communication, and in the intensities of sensory perception, temporal to dinner. Dinner should here be considered as not merely an event inscribed with a cultural and social norm-specificity. As something that can be experienced through direct engagement with dining. Rather it is something which negotiates outside of the table as well. The cultural praxis of dinner relies on socially, politically and culturally specific signs, structures, ‘organising principles’ - or points of reference - in order to become dinner. Such an organising does not happen independent from non-human actors, though what should be noted, is the multifarious dimensionality of these material signifiers as well.

This is also the crux my argument. It is needed not the case that matter - does not exist - or that - it does not speak - without the projection of human signifiers. There exists (De Landa 2007) a sense- perception through which the lived world is organised, or rather, self-organised. This self-organisational capacity is highly at work at the dinner table, as well as in the producing and creating of the dining-body. (This will be discussed more in depth in chapter 3) 10

One could here begin a thorough deconstruction of the historical projections of objects, actants and their relations to bodies, through which humans have come to learn and practice, the systems of

‘fact,’ central to dining. Though these matters of ‘fact’ that have come to be cannot be disregarded, such an investigation runs the risk of merely suggesting a new constitutive determinism, and, I will avoid them here. Instead what I propose, is to shift our focus — that is, the focus of those of us who are entertaining the concept of a post-Cartesian and post-humanist ontology - to the previously mentioned ‘facts’. Specifically to their intimate, or not so intimate materialities to the human body.

For such a project which values relativism above all else, the body, like the grandiose concept of the human subject, are viewed as sociotechnical compositions inseparable from their mediators, seg- menters and sequencers. This shift must be told and traced in the most perspicuous way. To do so successfully, I will not make deterministic claims about the fate of the human subject and it’s thought, or of the ‘objective’ human experience. On the contrary, what ensues is an attempt to map an alternative bodily subjectivity. One which is the affect of relations between a body and an empir- ical cultural ‘fact.’ It should also be noted that I hold a healthy scepticism towards such facts, and will briefly discuss their inter-relation with myth.

Soup for Dinner

Some time ago, a companion and I were eating dinner which we had prepared for several hours. Though if the finished product were to have ended up on an episode of Master Chef, or before the libertine eyes of Mr Ramsay, it would definitely not have scored well in terms of aesthetic appeal. In our defense, and to quote the great Roman poet Virgil, ‘trust not too much in a beautiful complexion’ (Eclogues). Nonetheless, this is secondary as the condensed soup turned out to be ap- petising, and more importantly to us its consumers, served its purpose; dinner was served. But what was that dinner for our bodies? Already here we see how the self-organisational potential of food, as it in effect assembles the material conditions of dinner and it’s bodies. It is not alone, as in indepen- 11 dent from these bodies, that food organises its constitutive productions. The subject, i.e. the diner, is not what matters here. Her/his effectivity on dinner is secondary to that of the dinner on the body.

For the body is what tells us about our material assemblages, our not so independent subjectivities.

So when my companion and I were having dinner, what relational productions were we allowing ourselves to be affected or sequenced by?

Well, first and foremost, I mentioned that the soup was a condensed one. Therefore, staying true to the defining adjective and aforementioned sensory logic, the relations of precipitative liquefying not only matter to the food matter itself, but to the ingesting bodies. Thus what matters here, is matter itself and their relational capacities of affect. Does the carrot ‘break down’ better if first boiled whole or sliced, and how does this effect taste? Can we attribute the sweetness of the soup to the melange of ingredients or can we reduce the taste to each respective component? After blending does the apple and onion re-vitalise, or even intensify, their potentials for being affected by spices?

I’m not suggesting to rush into a molecular gastronomy laboratory and conveniently, or not, decipher truths from these questions. I merely want to highlight how matter, just like the human, has several organising potentials and capacities, that have been located and assigned within a cultural praxis, in this case of dinner. Thus when eating the soup, one does not inherently consider what potentials one is eating. One tends to believe the meal to be the handprint of a professional human body, of the chef or not so professional body of the home cook. I suggest we minimise the human impact, or agency, for a moment, and focus on tasting relations and states. The emulsified carrot with the blended apple, and the cooked onion with the coriander, are components of a dinner-assemblage not limited to human orientations. We might as well ask, what can a carrot do?

By asking the Spinozist question in regard to a carrot, we are indeed setting boundaries, limits and conditions for the potentiality for the life of a carrot, and as to what course/courses it might take. 12

Above I have given an account of one potentiality of a carrot, in a dinner-assemblage. By emulsify- ing and liquidating the carrot, we are qualifying its ‘nature.’ Thus we might say one of two things; yes, a carrot has the potential of x with the risk of y, or, just as well, given that y is a risk-potential of x, x cannot be said to have the capacity for z. These are conditions not infallible qualities, myths not facts. This compels Roland Barthes’ to note that;

We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature. We now

understand why, in the eyes of the myth-consumer, the intention, the adhomination of

the concept can remain manifest without however appearing to have an interest in

the matter (1957, 128)

Following Barthes’, how are we than supposed to differentiate between myth and fact? If our orientations to objects, sensations and events are taken not as steadfast and contextually transcendental; but contrastingly as chameleonic, fluid and queer, can we sincerely speak of a rationally agential human subject? Or suggest that someone do the human thing? Are we not merely immersed in our own myths, the assemblages of sensation, gesture, nature and culture which we take as our very subjectivities? Must we not take myth seriously? Bruno Latour certainly does (1994) when thinking of alternative human subjectives. For Latour, myths and their inception, suspend and retrace our knowledge ‘of what constitutes the human subject and the nonhuman object,’ therefore;

Only a myth, at this point, may help move the discussion further and point

and the common locus from which is produced a certain type of linkage

between certain types of humanity and certain types of nonhumanity (791-792) 13

For the purpose of the re-thinking at hand, dinner is the myth, and the body on the table the common locus. How we regard this myth, is down to the culture of our treatment of the myth itself. Are we seeking to necessarily claim something anthropologically? Make a political statement about the

‘performance’ of dinner? For me, truth claims are not part of a myth, and rightly so. For this why myths stand as both captivating and mischievous. Lets thus turn our gaze to materiality between alimentary body-orientations, and their objects within the mythology of dinner.

Bodies of Myth - Miseria e Nobiltà (1954)

It is only appropriate — or perhaps a cliche — to discuss Italian culinary traditions as tran- scending the dinner table and kitchen; thus having an affect beyond the location and temporality of dinner, or cena. Whether this is the case in all Italian households, from the alpine cottages of

Madonna di Campiglio, to the villas of Tuscany and estates of the Scampia in Napoli, is certainly not a ‘matter of fact.’ More so it is a matter of myth. Therefore, I do not claim overarching trends which typify Italian dining, and translate into a social praxis. I am not interested in posing a truth about the rituals of Italian dining. Instead, I turn to folklore, to myth and to Mario Mattoli’s 1956 film Miseria e Nobiltà.

Perhaps, taking into consideration my own inclinations, this also has to do with the fact that I find

Italian food amongst the most ‘comforting’ of foods. This is not contra to that of my own native

Finland. There majority of dishes, like in Italy, occupy a space and materiality between the home and restaurant, between the domestic and commercial. Mash potatoes will please a gourmet diner as well as a student, as long as they are semiotically appropriated. Perhaps the bourgeois diner would relate to the dish less timidly, were it served a la something. Nonetheless, day-to-day Italian cuisine remains aesthetically unpretentious and at least out of the dominant European cuisines, the least 14

‘contaminated’ by the haute of haute cuisine. (Recognising here that my postulations over Italian cuisine as a totality, are simultaneously myth-constitutive. I will keep such categorisations to a min- imum)

Mattoli’s Miseria e Nobiltà is a comedy set in Napoli in the 1950s, notably in post-war Italy. The film deals primarily with the dynamics of friends and family, along with a perpetual theme of hunger, all in a satirical sketch-like manner. The lead protagonist, whom the camera is dominantly focused on in the scene which I will here outline, is played by renowned Italian comedian Antonio

Focas Flavio Angelo Ducas Comneno De Curtis di Bisnazio Gagliardi, more commonly known as

Totò. The scene I introduce bellow, begins with Totò’s character Felice Sciosciammocca, standing around an empty table along with his wife Luisella, his friend Pasquale along with his wife Con- cetta and their daughter Pupella. The film also features Gemma, played by a young Sophia Loren.

As the tittle suggests, Felice and Pasquale live in relative misery and poverty along with their wives, though in a grand estate which belongs to Peppiniello, Felice’s son. Their misery is indeed relative 15

(Fig. 1. Felice [Totò], the second from the left, seen along with the ‘gang’ as the argument is coming to an end. The chairs are positioned in the middle of the shot as the table remains outside of the camera angle and is only visible once all are seated) to the ‘nobility’ of the lives of Felice, Pasquale et co., as the men and women wear torn up clothes,

Felice hardly works though he is a scribe; Pasquale is a photographer. The nobility is represented through the environment and location where the entire film takes place. The externalities, of nobility and misery, are what matter 'orientationally' to the bodies on camera. Furthermore, the gestures and utterances of the ‘secondary’ characters - that ultimately means those who are, by aesthetic comparison, more noble then Felice and Pasquale in particular - should not be overlooked. For these bodies, such as that of the butler, are boundary signifiers for our main protagonists. These bodies vitalise the not so noble bodies to become noble. Whether or not this comes to fruition or not, is only of subsequent importance. These other bodies matter furthermore, as we will come to see, because the ‘main’ bodies we are watching in the scene, traverse into queer and even burlesque bodies. (This hasn’t the slightest sexual connotation) As completely antithetical to that which their noble orientations would suggest.

The scene begins with loud debating taking place around an empty table. Once the quarrel has died down, Felice, leads the gang to take all take seats on chairs which are located at a proximity to the dinner table, though have not been set up for dining (See Fig. 1). With his compelling and exagger- ated facial expressions, accompanied by zoomorphic barks, Felice’s body begins an event of orientation. This orientation is towards an immanent potential of dinner, though the object itself i.e. the food, remains uncharted. A playful and upbeat Disney-esque trumpet tune begins to accompany the barking, immanent-body. It appears that the pending arrival of food - the locus of dinner - politically orients those bodies, in an affective relation with matter itself. This would not be the case, for example, for an anorexic body. For such a body is not in a relation of affectivity with food matter. 16

That is to say, an anorexic-body rejects the effect of food (being full), and thus the affectivity of matter on the body. This matter is not limited to food. However, food is perhaps the most significant object in a dinner-assemblage, as it politicises, actualisesand orients hungry bodies.

A chef enters the dining room. He eyes the occupants of the room as if tallying them up in his mind.

He departs briefly, only to return along with two butlers carrying three wicker baskets, which immediately orient the gang. Here we have another object, a wicker basket, which is not one for laun- dry, flowers or gifts, but it might as well be. We must remain attentive to the assemblage of the basket, which is to say, or rather ask; what is the basket for whom? By its relation to a body, namely the chef, we are able to answer this question. The basket is semiotically actualised as an medium of food, in so far as it is presented by butlers and a chef. Further, the basket is immanent to the event of dinner. We also see here a reversal of the anorexic-body orientation. The bodies of Felice,

Luisella, Pupella, Pasquale and Gemma - all in an affective materiality with food - allow for an affective object, they do not reject it.

The staff of two butlers and a chef begin to lay out a dining cloth, plates and cutlery. While this is happening, the camera adjusts onto the wicker basket placed by Felice, and we see the affective relation in full force. The force of orientation between Felice and the basket, is in real contention. The wicker basket has been semiotically actualised, however there remains a cloth covering it’s content.

Here we have a double-dealing object, one which orients bodies toward a familiarity but not a certainty. Such an object could actualise affective relations within the already existing field of relations, i.e. with the immanence of dinner. However, it could also cause a break in relations, a re-orientation of points and forces of orientation, and of desire (something which will also be discussed further in chapter. 3). For Felice cannot be sure what the ontology of the basket is, unless he looks under the cloth. Unsurprisingly, the mischief-maker makes an untimely attempt of garnering a meal, 17 and does peak under the cloth covering the basket. The body is here, as it were, flooded by the object, it’s forces penetrating embodiment.

Not only does the trumpet tune intensify at this point, once the food is being served, the camera fo- cuses solely on the face of Felice as his guise becomes more and more ‘doglike’. His eyes begin to resemble those of a puppy, as do his bodily mannerisms; holding both of his arms to his sides and dangling his hands in front of his chest, as to mimic a canine on its back. What reason does a body have, what forces affect it, as to behave like a non-human? Certainly none that would suffice a

Cartesian. There is a queer relationship at stake here between the human and non-human. A relationship which revels in the inseparability of the subject and object, of nature and culture. Here zoomorphism has a greater vitality than anthropomorphism, and is something we should also ad- dress, but perhaps another time.

As the steaming spaghetti - that which is supposedly Isabella Rossellini’s guilty ‘pleasure’3 - is served along with fish, chicken and bread, the gang of jittery diners are left to indulge. The food has

3 The actress turned philanthropist/handbag designer was quoted in an Q&I with The Guardian (Dec 21. 2012) claiming pasta as being her ‘guilty pleasure’ and wanting to apologise to chickens for having ‘eaten them.’ 18

(Fig. 2. We see the dining table set and prepared, with the bowl of pasta placed in the middle of the table. The wicker basket to the left of Felice, who is all the way on the right, is the same one which he made an attempt at earlier, before the table had been set.) been left by the chef and butlers on the dining table, and the becoming of dining-bodies is in full effect. Let us return to the orientations suggested in the title of the film, namely that of nobility.

The first suggestion of the traversing of a dominantly noble force, comes unsurprisingly from Fe- lice. In its affective relation with food, and causal relation of hunger, Felice’s body takes the first

‘step’ towards the table. Unsuspecting faces surround the table, and as the anxiety builds, Pasquale’s palms begin rubbing on his thighs at a perpetually faster pace. We see these bodies as causally oriented. They are causal of the relationship between food and hunger, which clearly generates the hunger-effect in all of the bodies present in the scene. Dinner is now alive, it has become an affective event or force. It has become something with real differences. It has left noble forces of demand and orientations around the table, like flows or trails of condensation which aeroplanes leave in the sky. Although what is to follow, is what gives the scene the following name; La scena della pasta in tasca or ‘the scene with pasta in the pocket’. The noble event is quickly forgotten, even in the presence of the noble body of the butler. The unruly bodies productive of the hunger-effect, commence in shameless indulgence. Uncontrollably Felice attacks the steaming plate of pasta with his hands, and others instantaneously follow suit. An inspired barbarous madness ensues, which is depicted in Fig. 3 below. 19

(Fig. 3.)

Thingy Bodies

So, now we have established how objects orient us and how flows segment our subjectivities. The mythology behind dinner, I believe, is an apt event for such a de-threading of relations.

Because of the abundance of objects (food and non-food), and bodies in the dining-assemblage, we can look at a very particular myth and do not have to claim generalities of dinner at large. (This would also be going against the entire project of relativity) This is nonetheless not strictly a critique of the post-modern anthropos. It is not an assumption that we humans have departed a once ‘pure’ and pre-modern nature. Nor is this a suggestion that now, in a time of liquid modernity, nature and culture are finally separable - contra to the grand narrative of scientific reasoning. Instead what is at stake here is the malleable, contingent and ‘negotiative’ immanence of nature, of any nature.

I suggest not to assume one united, singular nature, as it would somehow exist independently of socio-technical manufacturing or human involvement. Thus presumptions such as ‘dinner should or must be…’ do not constitute truth about dinner, but merely myth. Like human subjectivity, dinner 20 can be viewed as a vital thing. Something bound to bodies and matter, but to their temporal differences as opposed their assumed singular nature. Jane Bennett elaborates on this notion of non-human vitality, by which she means:

… the capacity of things — edibles, commodities, storms, metals — not only to

impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi agents or

force with trajectories, propensities or tendencies of their own (2010, viii)

So what can a thing do to, or for, our bodies? How thingy are our bodies? According to Michael

Schudon (2014, 1) ‘some things are more thingy than others’. It this imbalanced thingness of things where the temporal differences, for example in relation to alimentary objects, are created and actualised. The orientations which position us at a dining table, are only limited to the objects within a given system of communication. This system tends to be limited to the kitchen, the diner, the su- permarket and butcher, but it needn't be as will be discussed in further chapter. Bodies are only bound in so far as they recognise the definite system of communication, and, are normatively oriented in so far as affective relations exist between the body and the matter.

Though both are things, steak for instance is less ‘thingy’ and more hard-boiled in its ontology than cheese. Steak does not inherently stand for a cut of beef, however for the sake of positing another myth lets agree that it does. Cheese on the other hand, has a much ‘looser’ ontology as it can be sourced from various livestock. It can obtain varying degrees of hardness and be fused with cumin, pesto or wasabi, not to even mentioned fondue. Thus dinner as discussed here, is more like a rennet- coagulated cheese, then steak tartar. It is like a complex microbiological and biochemical process, resulting in changes to the curd, and in the flavour and texture characteristic particular to the vari- ety (McSweeney, 2004, 127). 21

But what if, for example when looking into the wicker basket discussed earlier, it would have oriented Felice to something outside of the alimentary regime? That is to ask what if Felice were queerly oriented, like the anorexic body? An object wouldn't thus produce an alimentary orientation, but perhaps a sexual one?

After all, objects have just as many faces as humans and vice versa; the laboratory biologist does not become a biologist without her spatula and pipette, neither does the molecular gastronomer, the drug dealer nor the medical worker. We are here talking about a non-human vitality which - in the assemblage of the drug dealer for example - cannot be reduced to it’s parts. It is together with and in relation with matter, that the drug dealer and medical worker constitute their becomings. If we ex- tend this kind of vitalism - not to be misinterpreted as agency - to nonhumans, the event of dinner becomes a whole new space of negotiation. We can then begin to trace the trajectories of relations at the table, between humans and nonhumans, and consider the dining bodies, as hosts to the network of these forces, orientations, trajectories and flows. It is bodies which matter. To echo Deleuze and

Guattari, who draw heavily on Spinoza’s meditations of the body;

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 composition with other

affects, with the affects of another body (1987, 257)

If one is to discover and de-veil the affects of the body, one is to ‘dissipate the onto-theological binaries’ of human/nonhuman, a project which has been gaining significant pertinence in more contemporary academia (Buchanan, 1997; De Landa, 1997, 2006; Colebrook 2010) By doing so, one

‘induces in human bodies an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality’ (Bennett, x). 22

To expose and consider this affective openness, I proposed - following Latour (1994) - turning to a myth. It is neither by accepting nor rejecting the current myth, but simply by posing it as a ‘one of many’ dining experiences or practices, by which we can start to uncover the ‘common locus’ (La- tour, 791). We have managed to uncover this locus somewhat. We have established that the body is that which is common. But not a body. What still remains elusive as ever, as Probyn (217) notes at the very beginning of the chapter, is food and its movement. Food has tropic qualities that we can only begin to actualise when turning to body-affectivity. This places the body which tastes, smells and subjectively registers food, at conflict with the collective, politically and morally mediated body. This is the body upon which expectations matter, and upon which orientations effect. As perhaps the most obvious ‘relational organising matter’ concerned with the dining experience, food occupies a paradoxical location in its relation to the human. It is both a marker of the absolute indi- viduality, and complete universality (Simmel, 1994, 346).

Eating and dining remain separate here, although one does pass into the domain of the other, the

‘ritualised’ dinner practice is an advanced and engrained institution. As such, this institution matters to bodies at home, to those in the construction yard, the military and at the playground picnic. If we believe that eating stems from the productive hunger-effect - or a desire which produces hunger -

‘anchored in space and time,’ (Kristensen & Holm 2006) than what can eating-bodies tell us about dining, lunching or the Dutch social practice of borrel? We saw how the bodies in the scene from

Miseria e Nobilita became causal bodies of orientation. Causal of noble flows and intensities.

These are orientations for expected tendencies, and are actualised by drinking for example.

Though we can imagine tendencies as being objective - like that of dark clouds to usually produce rain, and that rain water to freeze in negative temperatures - these tendencies remain thingy. How- 23 ever, the same cannot be said about relations between tendencies and bodies. There are no objective tendencies of bodies; and therefore necessitates the return - rather anthropological than philosophi- cal - to body-orientations. Tendencies seen as inherent to nature, like that of water freezing, do per- vert orientations or collective enunciations. This is to say that orange juice, has an expected tenden- cy to quench my thirst, and thus the thirsty-body follows the forces of demand of the juice. Who I am to say that everyone who drinks orange juice, has been oriented by the thirst quenching capacity of the juice? Is it not conceivable to drink orange juice with ulterior orientations, such as for its nutritional/dietary value or simply to pleasure ones palate?

The body orients in a way as to relate to the object, to both affect it and be affected by it. Thus there are as many orientations as bodies, and several orientations can be capacitated by one body. We are not congruent subjects, whose actions and subjective enunciations reflect a uniform nature; as if a nature-mirror exists in which we compare ourselves to the nature of subjectivity. Rather, we are caricatures of such a nature. Amplified and dramatised, regulated and demoted caricatures. Nature is to be found in our planes of experience. That is, in our culture, as opposed to on some plane of externality which is not consciously conditioned. Therefore, we can hypothesis for example, of the several natures of orange juice, food, dinner and lunch. Which ultimately are corporeally dictated and become universally oriented, as to harmoupisouly bring together a subject and it’s object.

In the following chapters, I will attempt to demonstrate such orientations and suggest how we should begin considering something other than nature-proper. We should rather, to borrow Donna

Haraway’s term, imagine nature-cultures (2003).

Chapter 2)

The Body-Politics of a Business Dinner

What regulates the obligatory, necessary, or permitted interminglings of bodies is

above all an alimentary regime and a sexual regime (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 99)

In the previous chapter, I explored the notion of orientation (Ahmed 2006) as that which effectively assembles a dining event. With reference to a cultural artifact, Miseria e Nobilita, I made an attempt at suggesting the ‘mythical’ status which dinner has in my view assumed. This status which dinner has come to occupy in daily proceedings, will be further explored here with reference to day-to-day dynamics of a business dinner or lunch. These ritualistic practices from family meals to military canteens, which revolve around food and its consumption, have departed from the basic assumption that humans must eat. This departing - of which the concept of brunch is also a product of - has become inscribed into their very aesthetic of food, and thus onto bodies. Events like a business lunch, are not only perceived as concrete events of business, but are also highly materially charged foldings of space and body. In these events, the body which is perceived interior to subjectivity, becomes nothing less or more than a folding of the exterior world. Thus, potentials of the body are only limited in so far as those of the material world. Enter, what Annemarie Mol has termed, the body multiple (2002).

By virtue of its application to and for bodies, food - not just as nutritional sustenance but as matter - is constantly morphing. New forces of demand are inscribed into matter, for example, during a business dinner. This matter, as I will come to demonstrate, is not limited to food. A business dinner also matters for - and vice versa - the space it is politically, socially and sexually actualised in. It matters what intensities of colour, sound and smell orient bodies to and for an event as such. Here 25 food, and more specifically gourmet dishes, signify matter beyond consumption. This matter is far from innocence. It is what bodies either relate to or reject relations with. It is these relations which I wish to bring to the forefront here. Michel Foucault (1984) has for example claimed food as having replaced sexuality, as a locus for identity politics. This is a notion I will focus on in the final chapter, and currently something to keep in mind. Namely what I am concerned with, to follow Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Ahmed (2006), are the ‘intermingling’ events of alimentary and sexual regimes. To pursue this, I will discuss a scene from Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (2000) as one such ‘concrete’ event. By doing this, I wish to highlight the orientational-logic which food has come to acquire.

I will refer to this ‘logic’ as a position. As something which has been acquired (or better, has become) through politicised, socialised and sexualised human/non-human relations. These are relations in which those consuming, serving and preparing food, as well as the time, location and bodies the food is in affective relations with, all play together. This ‘playing’, constitutes much more then merely dining bodies, it exposes in food a multitude of ‘social, cultural and symbolic meanings,’ which then become bodily experiences, representations and orientations (Bell 1997). My analysis here will focus on these bodies as sites and contractors of power, politics and sexuality.

De-threading Body Events

Let us recall briefly the scene from Miseria e Nobilita which was discussed prior. By de- threading symbolic objects, gestures or utterances, we can begin - if so desired - to decipher the nature of cultural symbolism specific to post-war Italy. During this time, circa 1950, nationalist sym- pathisers were particularly popular and ‘the Italian identity’ was being re-examined in the post-

WW2 climate. This re-examining did not however - according to our little myth - challenge the already patriarchal and religiously systematised structure, of body-orientations and relations. Or did 26 it? For it is bodies, I believe, which can constitute real change. Changes in relations, in representation and affective flows of production; for example of creative ideas or actualisation of identity.

Thus in La scena della pasta in tasca, who or what constitutes such a challenge? Keeping with food, it could come by way of an Other. That is to say, by way of a foreign food endowed with new intensities and flows of sensory perception. However it does not. Neither do we see a sexualised challenge by way of a female body. Rather, this potential for challenging orientations is constituted by Felice’s humorously outrageous male body. But in order for Felice’s performance to be effective, and indeed actualise a creative potential - though it might not stray far from the table - he needs an object, a non-human; pasta.

Pasta remains pasta for bodies in the scene. This is crucial, because the relative ‘stability’ of pasta, is what allows for the conditions of possibility, for the actualisation of the hysterical and absurd body. As long as the object remains, the body can materialise an affective relation in what would be considered a highly unconventional manner, i.e. in a sexual one. Thus what can we take, or make, from this simple de-threading of bodily relations? The answer; a plethora of materialities with the potential to be untangled. A simple untangling would trace the binary sexual bodies and their rein- forced positions in lunching or dining events. These relations remain virtual in so far as they are assumed, not pronounced. However they constitute real differences. For example, Felice’s body remains the patriarch-organising/body-cue to all the rest of the bodies. Once his body becomes ludi- crously oriented, so do the rest. Thus the materiality between multiple bodies and one single body, is effectively conditioned by that single body’s relation to a common object, in this case pasta.

We can now begin to see how a de-threading around a table would take place, and what therein matters. Relations between persons traditionally considered active agents and non-persons or non-humans considered inactive, or passive objects, are what matter. Body-to-body, matter-to-matter, mat- 27 ter-to-body and body-to-matter, are all kinship systems, which cannot be reduced to one or the other. I believe this - or these relations - are also the crux of subjectivity. We should begin to get to know the world from the outside-in.

I will here focus on two features of these relational inscriptions which should be kept in mind for the duration of this chapter. Namely;

1. A body - and its materiality to other bodies - is always conditioned through its rela-

tion to bodies of (other) sexuality, gender, class, disability and race

2. A body is invariably actualised within a place, location or space. That is to say, that

bodies are geographical sites of representation. Along with sites of power, politics

and pleasure

To put it in the words of Judith Butler, my attempt is to de-thread the ‘repeated stylisation’ of a contingent body (1990, 33). This stylisation happens through various discursive matrixes, and what is important in this chapter, through and within space. The stylisation is not only constitutive of the physical body. It is embodied in conduct, in gesture and is therefore also performative of the space in which it is engineered; or in which a folding event occurs. It is through these events that the status of objects can change, morph or congeal into something else, hence altering orientations. What does the object now mean or do for the folded body? What affective bodily flows become into relation with the ‘new’ object? Thankfully Deleuze provides us with a proposition as follows,

The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold - in other

words, to a relation of form-matter - but to a temporal modulation that implies as 28

much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous

development of form (1993, 19)

In other words matter exists, but form is what we humans project onto, or, ‘make of’ matter. For example in the case of a hamburger, one establishes a relation to that form which ‘makes ethical sense’ in the time of the anthropocene. Yet, there exist stupendously perverse forms of hamburger that certainly do not compliment this mythical time. From the vegetarian variations of mushrooms, lentils, carrots and breadcrumbs; to the unflattering foie gras-stuffed, wagyu beef and truffle smoth- ered caliber (which is to be served with a bottle of red wine), the forms a burger takes are if any- thing, temporal modulations of orientation. Thus attempting to reduce a burger to its component parts, becomes a sterile event. Its ontological multiplicity is unbound. The hamburger-myth than, makes for an apt signifier of contemporary anthropological orientations, and I suggest should be taken up in further object orientated analysis. One can begin to see how such a ‘myth’, or any myth for that matter, signifies a particular time in a particular space, and then some as Deleuze suggests above. Let us now begin the de-threading of the mythical scene found in Ellis’ tour de force, Ameri- can Psycho.

American Psycho or Dido4?

I will here be using and relying on the cinematic interpretation of Brett Easton Ellis’ Ameri- can Psycho, though the original novel had been published a year prior in 1999. Ellis himself has stated that he feels the ‘book didn’t need to be turned into a movie,’ specifically because at the centre of the novel is an ‘unreliable narrator.’ When this must be then depicted on film, the narration

A gesture or affect of a malicious kind 29 becomes reliable in so far as ‘it [the movie] demands answers’.5Ellis’ position is a relative one, and one that I agree with. For I hold that one thousand words, say more than a picture every could. Ellis recognises American Psycho’s unanswered ambiguity - in its novel form - as the crux of the story,

I don’t think American Psycho is particularly more interesting if you knew that he

did it [committed murders etc] or think that it all happens in his head. I think the

answer to that question makes the book infinitely less interesting (Ellis, 2010)

To echo Ellis, I also do not intend to unravel or speculate upon the ‘hidden truths’ in the film. For me, this oblivion is what sustains the vitality of the work and does not relegate it to a deterministic score. So, by working together-with the cinematic depiction, I want to know the following: What can we say about the human and nonhuman actants, which together congeal the relations necessary for the constitution of a) the space for a business lunch, and b), the bodies that ‘lunch’ or ‘dine’, i.e. business (verb) within that space? To begin this working-together, we do not have to look past the opening scene of the satirical masterpiece. (Duly noted that the scene discussed here is not lunch, but dinner)

As the trademark slogan you are what you eat suggests, food has for long been thought of as having self-defining or self-organising qualities when it comes into relations with a body. These relations have created an inescapable tie between that which one puts in ones mouth, and identity. For me, this 'identity' assemblage is a simultaneous actualisation of desire, pleasure and body-politics. De- sire to produce an aggregate of food, i.e. saturation. The pleasure principles, or in other words, the immanent values of taste which are made available to the body, not by the body. Which is to say

5 Ellis was asked about the ﬁlm adaptions of his books in a 2010 audience interview at The University for Creative Careers. The interview can be found following the link: http://clatl.com/freshloaf/archives/2010/06/19/1534716-bret-easton-ellis-talks-ﬁlm-adaptations-at-scad 30 that what one tastes, even if eating the same dish as someone next to you, is also down to the affective or inaffective folding of meal; as well as the material conditions under which it is served for, and actualised by. the body. That is to question: what does it do for, or to, the heterosexual body, to eat club sandwich? An ontologically queer food assemblage.

The club sandwich is ontologically so loose, that it can resemble a Caesar salad just as much as burgers and chips. It can be cold or warm, packaged or served from the kitchen. It can come in two halves, four quarters or even in bite-size, served on ends of cocktail sticks. Thus for the body, eating a club sandwich is the accepting and actualising of hybrid alimentary relations. Or, the capacity the capacity to actualise a hybrid, or queer, ontology. In this event of affective materiality, relations between body and food, I suggest, define no only the who. But more so what the consumer-body is, in essence. Thus eating a club sandwich, or a queer ontology, requires a certain orientation of the body.

One that is for example distinct from that of eating steak. A steak has a clear and undisputed ontology, and is essentially defined by three or four 'modes of ripeness', and that is it. In this sense, the body prior to the consumption of the steak, has a simple orientation to make. This orientation has even in most cases been actualised already in the event of choosing the steaks ripeness. However, when a body chooses to order or purchase a club sandwich, what 'modes' are orienting the body? As

Taylor notes,

Food, marking for gender, race, ethnicity, class, and politics, is a significant

expression of each of these sites of identification, and thus functions as an

important means of self-constitution (Taylor 2010, 76)

Therefore, perhaps in desiring a club sandwich, a body desires something queer and hybrid? Some- thing which does not demand and force a clear and distinct orientation? On the contrary, an orienta- 31 tion I argue that is far from being queer, is that vegetarianism. Though I do not wish to downplay alimentary choice itself, for me it is one which undoubtedly has been inscribed into binaries of masculine/feminine, ‘whiteness’ and class. This choice is often associated with femininity, as one is choosing to reject masculine associations with hunting, meat-eating, butchering, and slaughtering. I use the word ‘choice’ here with full intent, as vegetarianism is ultimately a position made available by ones relation to food, wealth, status etc. Or is it even perhaps a privilege? For me, its hard to imagine that in Angola where food is scarce - especially in an arid environment - that one would reject meat due to a lifestyle choice. Similarly, I associate not not buying fur or leathers as a privilege, which it ultimately is here in the Global North.

We – by which I mean bodies in Western Europe - have the capacity to produce synthetic materials for clothing, along with synthetically processed foods. This is a capacity of food and clothing matter, and indeed a further temporal modulation of science, nutrition and aesthetics. It is a choice made available by techno-science, pursued in a humanist vein, which is to say it is not about the human, but instead for it’s benefit. What we encounter in Ellis’ cinematic depiction, is a dramatic reversal of this vegetarian-feminine position. The protagonist Patrick Bateman, played by Christian

Bale, performs an absurd role of a Wall St. yuppie whose life choices are - like that of the vegetarian - foldings from the outside-in.

Murky Red Substance

When American Psycho opens, the viewer is met with a blank white surface, upon which the various cast members names and titles are displayed (How surprising…) Drops of a dense red liquid fall vertically across the screen, in tune with the plucks of an otherwise symphonically mastered violin. The viewer might at first glance associate this curious red substance with paint, blood, wax or even nail polish. The density of the substance is seemingly perceptible. However, the ontology of 32 the substance becomes slightly more intelligible, as the murky red matter comes to contact with the white surface. It continues to flow once reaching the surface, at a steady rate, forming a stream of the, still, unidentified material. The relation between the substance and the white backdrop, becomes thus manipulated, and the viewer struggles to at first orient itself ‘accordingly’.

The manipulation of the unknown red entity, results in wavy movements — and thus patterns — being projected onto the white surface. The music has also developed into an increasingly harmonic violin-led medley, as if to accompany the development of an organic assemblage. Next; the give- away. A knife appears out of nowhere, to violently slice a fresh oven-baked ciabatta. The beans have been spilled. Food; is indeed how the film is first introduced to the viewer after the prelimi- nary ambiguities. Not only is the inclusion of food here significant, but the space in which it is presented; the values it connotes. This remains yet unknown, but soon becomes soon revealed.

A ciabatta enjoyed at a communal working-site lunch in Genoa - perhaps just with olive oil — as a

‘system of communication and protocol,' is hardly the ciabatta sliced and served at an Upper East

Side restaurant. This, Upper East Side restaurant, is where the film begins. It was Roland Barthes who thought that food should not merely be ‘priced’, in regard to its nutritional value, but it should also be considered as ‘a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behaviour.’ (orig. 1961//2008, 29) To go a step further than Barthes’ suggestion, food on its own cannot perform ‘situations and behaviours’. As I have suggested, food — be it cooked or uncooked, slaughtered or harvested — is invariably caught in a multiplicity of relations. This is not a peculiar ‘state’ for any other object. Food is not a singular matter-structure, but a vital thing whose ontological constitution is just as relational to the human and non-human actors, as it is to the space in which it is constituted. Thus in order for food to be an active player in a system of communica- 33 tion, or constitutive assemblage of orientation, we should begin to de-thread what the specific dishes — which will be mentioned below — do and mean, to bodies actualised in a business space.

The ontology of the above mentioned stout and elusive red substance, becomes evident once it comes in contact with another material. Once again, it is in relation to something, some other object or matter, by which the viewer sense perception becomes animated. The white surface upon which the red stream now flows, reveals itself as a plate. Following what is only moments later clarified via the anonymous citing of a restaurant employee as raspberry coulis, these two actants merge in a decorative manner. This merger is the start of the to-be assemblage, of rare roasted partridge breast in raspberry coulis with a sorrel timbale (Ellis). These are the opening lines-turned offers of the film. Accompanied by suggestions of swordfish meatloaf with onion marmalade, grilled free-range rabbit with herbed french fries and squid ravioli in a lemon grass broth with goat cheese prof- iteroles (Ellis). All this matter-turned-form, is only the beginning of the folding of bodies.

Silk Gloves

Now that the camera has settled in the restaurant, the viewer begins to get a first glimpse of the dining and serving-bodies. Firstly the hands, the prehensile-machines of the human body. The hands that are seen to be enjoying the above mentioned dishes, include a cigarette-smoking-hand and a black-silk-gloved hand. The exclusive dishes, the cigarette being smoked in a refined yet flamboyantly decorated dining hall, and the black silk glove, signify for us two important things. 1)

These are dishes of cultured taste, of an acquired and performed taste, which requires a body through which to actualise and become haute. These are dishes not intended for the blue collared.

And 2) The space in which these dishes are assembled and performed, as it were, codify the dishes themselves by virtue of the dinner event. The food-event begins in the kitchen. It begins in the hands of the garde manger and entremetier, but it is made in relation to the entire dining space and 34 it’s bodies. Thus, the performance of a silk glove and a smoking cigarette, are just as crucial to the values and taste sensed in the dish, as the matter-turned-form that is performed by the glove sport- ing-body.

It is highly unlikely — though not impossible — that those who would be common folk, would ever intend on wearing a gloves while enjoying a meal. Alienated from the contextual and patio-temporal performance of the glove, that body would remain outside the constitutive ‘discursive matrix’ of bourgeois dining (Butler 1997, 84). Thus those who sport a silk glove in a space of dining, are not merely performing the perceived orientations of dining at a haute establishment. More so, they acti- vate the materiality of the material to the space, from the glove to the haute locality. Hence bodily, sensually and materially actualising their own haute-body. This is also true in the opposite; what constitutes the bodily performance of the glove, is the space in which it is actualised. It is these relative kinship systems between bodies and space, - and indeed their inexorable profusion - which compels a rethinking of the solely agential, rational and effective subject.

“Chicks Restaurant”

Once the camera has ‘flown’ around the absurdly decorated and wildly theatric dining rooms, it settles at the table where the viewer meets, for the first time, the film’s protagonist and his business associates. The three men emit a self-indulgent and pompous aura. They are dressed in late

80’s power suits, have slicked back hair and are slouching in their post-dinner fatigue. These stereo- typical Wall St. caricatures assume conversation:

Price: God, I hate this place. This is a chicks restaurant. Why aren't we at Dorsia? McDermott: Because Bateman won't give the maitre d' head.

McDermott: Is that Reed Robinson over there? 35

Price: Are you freebasing or what? Thats not Robinson. McDermott: Who is it then? Price: Thats Paul Owen. Bateman: Thats not Paul Owen.Over there. Paul Owen is on the other side of the room. Over there. McDermott: Who is he with? Price: Some weasel from Kicker Peabody.

[Van Patten, the fourth colleague, returns to the table]

Van Patten: They don't have a good bathroom to do coke in. McDermott: Are you sure thats Paul Owen over there? Price: Yes. McDufus, I am. McDermott: He's handling the Fisher account. Price: Lucky bastard. McDermott: Lucky Jew bastard.

[Further conversation regarding anti-semitism, until the bill is brought to the table]

Price: And speaking of reasonable...

[Price shows McDermott the bill for their business meal]

McDermott: Only $470. Van Patten: Not bad. (No irony intended)

What is immediately striking from the conversation above, is the significant attention payed to everything non-food related matter. Besides the ‘small’ matter of actually paying for it, the meal 36 itself is not discussed. The food is hardly mentioned6. The semiotics of the scene matter, however I will focus on the foldings, which are much more than semiotically actualised. The shameless mate- rialism of the characters is ripe for commentary, however, I feel that this is precisely the grand intention of the depiction. The ‘traditional’ post-modern film critic might assert that this petty arro- gance is in the nature of the characters, so let me therefore offer an alternative. Lets look into the foldings of these sexually normative, heterogeneously white hyper-masculine bodies. We could eas- ily conclude that the business-dinner, or lunch, is indeed less about the food, and more about sexualised elements, gestures and flows which vitalise the meal. This would be an accurate commentary.

Further, we might say that this is first and foremost a business event, space and performance. Busi- ness is that which orients bodies, but food is what actualises business-bodies. Thus we cannot escape the food! For without food-matter, what conditioning and organising principle remains for the seated bodies? Food remains the crux. For food, together-with a body, establishes a space from that which is placed on the plate, and from that which is tasted but no necessarily enjoyed. Here we have a subjective codification, of an “hautness”, via the physical gesture of eating. Essentially we are talking about a folding. A folding of the material space, its conditions, codes and its signifiers, into an interiority perceived as impenetrable.

Take the first two lines of the conversation above. Price’s discontent at the restaurant as one for

“chicks,” just might be rooted in the lack of a masculine ambience, interior or perhaps a quality, or quantity, of the food that he sought to be missing. Whatever it may be, it is retracting from the grand narrative of the dining event; business first. Or is it? Simply by affirming to himself and the others

6 This is only the case with the cinematic adaption, as Ellis’ novel does begin before the actual first line of the film; god I hate this place. Before Price’s utterance, he himself suggested that their plates had been removed because the portions are so small to begin with, that the waiter ‘probably thought we were finished’ (1998). Van Patten also excuses himself prior to the bathroom, where he makes his regretful discovery about the inadequacy of the cocaine-consuming facilities provided by the restaurant. In the novel, Bate- man narrates that he is currently ‘in a bad mood because this is not a good table and Van Patten keeps asking dumb, obvious questions about how to dress.’ Bateman is nonetheless taking the time to explain his, or rather the, etiquette for not dressing as not to appear ‘too studied’. 37 that they are at a “chicks restaurant,” i.e. not one where MEN do business, the conditions of businessness are compromised. This detachment from femininity in order to remain a businessman, is merely a folding of the objectively perceived ‘nature’ of a man in the ‘business world’. A chicks restaurant could not possibly be the space in which a such a dinner is had could it? Certainly not for these men. Instead, the chicks restaurant is a threat to the coded masculine solidarity of a business dinner. The solidarity, is what follows foldings. Intensities of material masculinity and of alpha-sexuality, are amongst others, capacities these men actualise. They do so in relation to other bodies, including each others. The flows of hyper-masculinity find each other, intersect, tangle around the table and;

… highlight in spectacular ways the interarticulation of sites of difference: the

interweaving of class, gender, ethnicity with sexuality. (Probyn 422)

These sites of difference, are the root to materially created hyper-masculinity. It is from these sites that identities are created, in so far as they are not discovered. In the film, Bateman does create for himself an ‘identity’, though I wish to discuss it as a body-multiple. Bateman does what Deleuze

(1977) calls experimenting with the virtual. His becoming is that of a sadistic serial-killer; something which I can imagine Deleuze would have pounced on, considering his work Coldness and

Cruelty (1967), in which philosophically articulates differences and genealogies of Sadism and

Masochism. Nonetheless this becoming - a grotesque development of Wall St. masculinity - is something real and productive. It is productive of a further space of difference, where the material environment conditions the actualisation of the serial-killing-body. Bateman chooses not to continue living in the actual, but ventures - albeit submerged in twisted savagery and kinky sadism - into the world of virtualities and of creative potentials. 38

Following Foucault (1985) and Probyn (1999), I suggest that foldings such as that of a serial-killer, have only proliferated - not that there was ever necessarily a time free-from-folds - since the En- lightenment. They are integral to material culture, indeed to all culture. For me, the entire culture of the human is a folding. It is a folding of the material and semiotic histroical genealogies, from which the human is learnet and practiced. These genalogies obviously remain contested, and their de-threading would require a tour-de-force.

Instead, let me here articualte foldings are that immament to the modern. To this, it is the proliferation of gastronomic perversions; the institutionalisation of breakfast/brunch/lunch/dinner, and for example the privilege of vegetarianism amongst other dietary 'courses', which constitute foldings I am interested in. This is what I suggest anthropological inquiry should pay attention to. For it is these events, courses and positions which have increased the sexualised, racialised and coded bodies. It is these coded bodies orient to spaces, for exmaple of dining. These bodies have also diversi- fied the material actualisation of identity, through association and kinship with non-human matter, creating a human/non-human material rapport.

Cocaine Facilities

Let us now return to the dialogue. Dorsia would clearly have been the more appropriate location according to Price. However the gang ended up at the present theatrically designed rosy establishment, because Bateman, according to a leering McDermott, refused to give the maitre d’ head. What can only be meant by McDermott as a jest or dig, now materialises the heterosexual position around the table; and positions it, as well as Bateman, contra to homosexuality (To make it clear, I am here assuming that the maitre d’ in this case is a man). Once again the normative values and performances transcend from the office to the dinner table. As the scene progresses, the viewer witnesses the post-dining bodies develop into sites of multifaceted representations. The men begin 39 staring around the dining rooms and hypothesising as to who is dining with whom. In the end, is this all just a political scheme to reify the status of a businessman?

There is indeed an inescapable obsession with cliquishness, which is only heightened by the very dinner, consolidating the protagonists own clique and cementing class solidarities (Tierney 2012,

4). Although Tierney refers to class, we should not be content with merely a Marxist inspired class analysis. For there is much more to be said about foldings, then just as markers of class. Bateman and his palls are more or less dressed the same, have similar haircuts, use the same terminology and practice the same trade — surely that qualifies as cliquey. These corporeal aesthetic creations matter for Bateman, Price, Van Patten and McDermott, but more so they matter to the dinner as an assemblage. A business dinner cannot be reduced to a suit or some rare roasted partridge breast. As De

Landa says, the sum will always remain greater than its parts (2007). These components are all relative to the greater assemblage of the business dinner, and they are only material-semiotically actualised in relations.

Consider the bathroom mentioned by Van Patten, as ‘not good for doing cocaine’. The bathroom in the restaurant, might also be inadequate for the spoilt young couple who frequent the Upper East

Side establishment. But for the couple who might be at the restaurant to commemorate their twenty year anniversary, the bathroom might be fine. For the two women sitting a few tables away from our protagonists, - and whose bodies might be creating a space for a dinner date or girls night out - the bathroom might be just right. They might be well maintained, spacious and freshly scented.

However, not for our protagonists whose motivations for using the bathroom facilities differ vastly.

Here, orientations and the system of kinship extends as it were, to the incapacity of the bathroom.

It is Van Patten who creates an inadequate bathroom for snorting cocaine. That is to say, the (subjective) absence of a bathroom which is adequate for cocaine use, only exists in relation to the event 40 of a business dinner. When Van Patten returns hurriedly to the table, he is quick to inform the rest that he has scouted the cocaine snorting facilities and concludes them to be insufficient. We can only assume this is valuable information to the rest of the bodies around the table, who are now segmented further as drugged-bodies. Thus the insufficient bathroom, exists material-semiotically only for our Wall St. yuppie-bodies in relation to a business dinner.

These four folded bodies are effectively contingent performers. Their performances are constricted by their bodies’ materiality to sexuality, class, location and what I wanted to show here, food. This incapacity is just as crucial to the ‘businessness’ of dinner, then the suits, slicked hair and food.

If it is the case that our subjectivities are mere foldings of the outside world, should we not question these relations which govern our morality? Essentially that is what this chapter is about, a politics and ethics which is relationally mediated by material conditions and events. This is also largely the question that Foucault tackles, and consistently comes back to throughout his oeuvre. As Foucault himself states, he attempted to analyse the relations among science, politics and ethics (1984, 116).

Similarly, this is what I have attempt at doing, but in regard to food, sexuality and ethics. Echoing

Foucault, I concur that there is a certain interchangeability between sexuality and food (Which will also feature heavily in the final chapter). Here we have two affective forces, sexuality and food, which both mediate and constitute, fold and unfold bodies. So how must we then think of the body?

Must we further stratify the body, as being one thing but not another? Capable of this kind of affectivity but not that? No, we mustn’t. Instead, lets return to Spinoza and Nietzsche, who sought a re- configuration of cause and effect, of thingness. For Nietzsche,

It is only after the model of the subject that we have invented the reality of things

and projected them into the medley of sensations. If we no longer believe in the 41

effective subject, then belief also disappears in effective things, in reciprocation,

cause and effect between those phenomena that we call things… (1968, 297)

What I have here attempted to do, is in its own right what Nietzsche calls for. If we do away with the ‘model of the subject,’ we are left with a body, with a ‘thing’. Following an intrinsic thingness, the body vitalises when comes into relations with other bodies, with sensations of sound, with intensities of light, dark, smooth and rough. What is the body to do, how is to materialise, in relation to sexuality and food, or rather, with the two? Both concepts, which they effectively are as a prod- ucts of creation, occupy a binary. They are both effective objects of necessity and of pleasure. Of necessity, in terms of sexual reproduction and alimentary saturation. And of pleasure, ranging from sexual practices such as flirting, to the contemporary gastronomical perversions like the hamburgers discussed earlier. Therefore it appears that the body is all but a singular totality. It cannot forever reside in one locality, take as its object one subject or one orientation. For Deleuze, this is why the body is always the fruit of chance (1983, 40). The body is a product of chance, and more specifically, of the forces constitutive of chance. These forces are much more effective on the subject, than

Bateman, Van Patten and co. would like to imagine.

So what matters than, the heterosexual-body as a concept or the heterosexual-body? For Foucault it is your sexuality as your personal behaviour which is the problem (Foucault 1982, 127). But if this behaviour is constituted by forces, which then fold into an ineffective subject, can the subject at all be responsible for its ‘subject position’? It is not the body of the Wall Street yuppie that is the problem. Rather, it is the ‘relationship of forces that constitute a body’ (Deleuze 40). Bodies are external relational investments. One might here ask, ‘but what about agency’? Am I suggesting that we are born into a world, where external forces override individual action? Perhaps… 42

But there is still one chapter! Hope remains! In this third and final chapter, I will suggest a re-conceptualisation of desire, as something productive. This re-conceptualisation isn't thought of in terms of agency. Though it nonetheless restores some potential in the capacities of subjects - or what

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as desiring-machines - to act and affect. 43

Chapter 3)

Desiring Affectivity: A Bodily Experiment with the Virtual

In short, relations are inseparable from the capacity to be affected. So that Spinoza can consider two fundamental questions as equivalent: What is the structure (fabrica) of a body? And: What can a body do? A body’s structure is the composition of its relation. What a body can do corresponds to the nature and limits of its capacity to be affected. (Deleuze, 1990 218)

The Spinozist message is a powerfully simple one. We are not free to eat, we are caused to eat, which means our hunger is the product of a relation with food… If, like the hunger artist, we are unaffected by food, if we are not prompted by it toward a particular action - eating - then we will not experience the hunger-affect, and will not be induced to eat. (Buchanan, 1997 78)

Continuing with the themes introduced in the preceding pages, this final chapter will exam- ine and re-conceptualise desire in orientations. Or better, in the actualisation of deviant sexual bodies. I will suggest that feederism allows for such a re-thinking. Feederism is essentially the practice, event or becoming, in which one finds either feeding another person, or getting fed, sensually and sexually stimulating. It can also involve a force of affectivity or pleasure, from ones own weight gain or that of others. I will not however characterise feederism as a fetish, and therefore designate a materiality between food and body, as something ‘abnormal’ or ‘irrational.’ By discussing an account of feederism, I attempt to highlight what Deleuze and Guattari suggest to be an inherent, productive capacity of desire. My intention is not to suggest feederism as an example of such desire, but rather to entertain a reconceptualisation of desire with feederism. It is useful to consider such a reconceptualisation especially with regards to sexual bodies, as we can begin to think, and talk, 44 about desire outside of psycho-analytical discourse. Following and borrowing Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts, I argue that there exist many more flows and intensities of desire, than that of the sexual.

Contra to a Freudian conception of desire, I will suggest that desires might not be limited to sexual urges and are indeed not fuelled by an inherent lack of something. (Or indeed of someone, a human or non-human) Instead, desire should be considered here as a productive, creative capacity, as something which actualises the virtual (De Landa 2011). The virtual is the spaces of difference from which identities, cinema, politics, science, philosophy , etc., are created. In other words, the virtual holds within it potentials. As a boundless space of potential, the internet is a spectacular site for the creation and actualisation of vast ‘virtualities ,' especially sexual identities. To this, sites such as Dimensions, the Official Crush Message Board and Fantasy Feeder, are essential localities.

Be they fetishes, ‘deviant’ sexualities or paraphillic inclinations, these are all openly discussed in communal forums, thus actualising identities. It is possible to do this anonymously if one so wishes.

( Safir, 2008). This is a process of creation.

The actualisers of these forums create, learn and re-learn their queer orientations ‘online,’ by actualising virtual potentials ‘offline’. That is, by experiencing and then describing to one another, subjective accounts of experimentation — more often than not, bodily. This is opposed to the so called

‘modern sexual subject,’ who remains a subject, born into a sexuality. Into a concept, as ironically queer as that may seem/sound (Pun intended). This subject does not learn, but accepts her/his sexuality ‘offline’. This is another way of saying that capacities the of heteronormativity, are discovered, not created. Heteronormativity does not exactly bask in potential. This, I suggest, is true from biology to philosophy.

The Hetero-Project 45

The heterosexual body therefore, does not constitute a great anthropological project. It falls short in so far as its considerations of the human subject, are produced in the face of hetero-natures and hetero-cultures. Thus, interactions and expressions will always carry a kind of hetero-weight/ merit. This blatantly does not allow for promiscuous couplings that challenge the normative force of gender and sexual categories (Garlick 2007). To move beyond these engrained categorisations, requires courageous experimentation with sexuality-potentials. This is what feederism does. To echo

Deleuze’s thoughts on the Masoch, who like the feeder, are both great artist(s) in that they discover new forms of expression, new ways of thinking and feeling and an entirely original language (1971

16).

Let us here consider the argument from the previous chapters. Namely, that there exists an inseparable materiality between bodies and space. Spaces need bodies to remain spaces demarcated from other spaces. Likewise, body y — lower case intended to signify the still virtual, not yet actualised body — needs space x in which to actualise as body Y. This very relation constrains what would popularly be considered deviant sexual identities, or performances of sexuality, to their created locality on the internet (blogs, video-blogs, chat forums etc). The further these actualisations distance from normative sexuality, the more distant these bodies become from a totality. As shown in the previous chapters, all bodies are segments, deviant or not. Our bodies are segmented via race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, morality and politics. Thus, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1983) we wound up as bodies-without-organs. What matters is whether one creates and probes these segments, that is, actualises creative potentialities. Or, does one simply accept the actual and continue to live according to it? By introducing desire into the composition of segmented bodies, we might begin to unbind hetero-weighted naturecultures. 46

Following Bruno Latour (1993) and Deleuze and Guattari (1983), the development and conception of the human subject cannot be separated from material historical processes. These human-material kinship systems, are also the crux of scenes discussed in the preceding chapters. Both the non-human and the human develop together, though not in accordance with each other. These develop- ments are pronounced in artefacts such as thought, biology, psychiatry and cinema. This move goes against Cartesian dualities and Freudian theories of the unconscious, and for me, constitutes a necessary move. The mind/body and nature/culture binary, is something that post-anthropocentric scholars, such as Donna Haraway, have been working on since the late 80’s. I wish to depart from anthropocentrism, and begin to consider alternative ways to conceptualise perceived irrational desires. I view the human as a fluid concept, and essentially body folded from ‘the outside world’. It is an assemblage open to boundless creations and re-creations, which does not emerge in isolation; but together with socially and historical contingent material/non-human properties and conditions. The same might be said, as will be argued here, in the case in the materiality between food and sex. To go about such task, is to experiment and explore the virtual; to take something unknown, and reify it.

Desiring The Virtual

So than, what exactly is feederism? I will here provide my conception, which I encourage to be read as a mere conceptualisation, nothing else. Through some research on the internet, one finds assortments of accounts and articles, videos and anonymous diary entires dealing in general with all things feeder. Journalistic accounts tend to focus on the feeder-feedee relationship, where some more academically grounded inquiry might also discuss feederism take exists independent from a partner. Thus the term itself remains highly contented. 47

Feedees - those who are fed by a feeder — typically experience a sexual pleasure that according to some, namely 23 year old Tammy Jung, is greater than that during sex itself (Vice 2014). Essential- ly, an aggregate of plumpness is at stake. In the face of our otherwise ‘ideal,’ bio-politicised and highly fitness-regimented bodies, is it even that much of a ‘fixation’ to desire the opposite?

Wouldn't it precisely constitute a radical agency, an actualisation of the virtual, were one to volun- tarily gain weight amidst the multifold of politicised dietary regimen that the moderns live? I find the ‘fetish’ itself intriguing, however my goal here is not to provide a speculative history of this or that fixation. It should also be noted that simply because one identifies with the feederism community, does certainly not mean one desires feeding. An FA - Fat Admirer - or a Chubby Chaser - a term often used amongst homosexuals — are both ‘positions’ in which the desire is not to feed, but simply for the enlarged size of oneself or another. There is a constant bodily inquiry at play in

‘feeder’ culture, one which the hetero-nature of sexuality does not allow for. This experimentation is daunting. It is something which might be exercised in normalised social practices as well, on the condition that virtual potentials are actualisable.

Therefore to engage with virtual potentials, is to experiment or to deviate. It is not to continue an actualisation of life based on existing planes of experience, such as accepting heteronormativity in the work place. Rather it is to enquire and delve into an experimentation with potentialities, such as the vast potentials in an actual virtual space, the internet. The internet is a locality vital to feederism, just like the home is to the nuclear family. Admittedly, I would not currently be writing about the practice if I hadn’t come across it on the internet. For some, such as for ‘feeders’ like Dave who will be discussed below, experimenting on the heterotopic space that is the internet, and in the real, can be a strikingly different experience. Especially in the ‘real world,’ it requires courage, the courage of someone not to know what everyone else knows (May 2010). As I will suggest, Dave did exactly this. He choose ‘not to know’ what stands as actual for everyone else. He desired an alterna- 48 tive production or actualisation of desire. And frankly he explored a virtual potential in the real, at least momentarily. This is not to say that Dave produced his object of desire, no. As,

… desire does not take as its object persons or things, but the entire surroundings

that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined,

introducing therein breaks and captures (Deleuze et. Guattari, 1983, 292)

So what would a ‘feeder’ or ‘feedee’ desire? What virtual relations produces these intensities, vibrations and affective flows of pleasure and arousal? In order to explore these relations, I will take as my object an article written by Julia Nicole, published on Vice Munchies in the summer of 2014.

“Accidentally Falling into Feederism”

In her article Nicole tells us about her personal experience with a ‘feeder.’ After the third date with Dave who she had met on an online dating service, Nicole was approached by Dave with a query; “He wanted to ‘try something.’ Could he feed me? He wanted to know.” (Nicole 2014)

What follows is a short exert from Nicole’s article.

It’s hard to sit back and try to analyze a fetish when it’s not personal to you. Sex is

inherently weird. People find a myriad of things erotic, like peeing in gag bound

gimps’ mouths and wearing mascot costumes, so really how far fetched is a food

fetish, after all? Maybe it’s psychological, or maybe it’s just a preference. As long as

both parties are into it and enter the sexual foray with an awareness of the

consequences, there is little that anyone can do to stop them. So have fun, I guess.

But how could I not take this personally? Suddenly I was kicking myself for all of the

instances that I had spoken excitedly about food, or had slightly obsessively harped 49

on the incredible properties of bread yeast. Then I thought about that not so long

ago time at the bar when he had squeezed my stomach in this long, drawn out, sen

sual way. In my inebriated glory I thought that maybe it could be cute, or affec

tionate. Now, it just seemed kind of fucked up.

I couldn’t help but take it personally because suddenly my body shape and my

fascination with food had turned into an inherently sexual entity. I was no longer

Julia who likes to bake and eat oysters and tell shitty jokes. I was a fuckable fat girl,

beckoning Dave to feed me.

(Nicole, 2014; I Accidentally Fell Into the Feeder Fetish Community)

In her opening two lines, Nicole suggests two very crucial aspects related to what for her, is a fetish.

However, and unfortunately, she does not consider the weirdness of sex or the difficulty of analysing an impersonal fetish, relatively. Instead Nicole departs from her promising two sentences, and spins the commentary so that she and her body, become the judged and the juror after being approached by Dave. Nicole does so only through her own consent. Dave’s materiality to her body, is what all of a sudden changes in the mishmash of relations. Consequently for Nicole so does her physical body. It means something different for her, by relation of Dave’s desire. For Nicole, her’s is no longer an innocent baking body, but a mortified sexual entity. But mortified by what? By a thought? A suggestion?

Nicole admits that she had, prior to meeting Dave, stumbled ‘upon the term in [my] cyber travels’ (2014). She also admits that the ‘internet has done monumental things for the fat apprecia- tor’ (2014). I’m compelled to agree with Nicole, that indeed the internet has done good things, 50 however, for Nicole at least, the internet remains virtual plane. Not one part of or together with the real material world, but a virtualisation of it. For feederism on the contrary, the internet makes available zones of actualisation and thus, establishes system of communication quite literally. For

Nicole the internet is synonymous with cyber travelling, whatever that may mean for her. Buchanan notes that this precise capacity and limitless potential for searching, surfing and ‘cyber travelling’,

‘fosters the desire to search by constantly rewarding us with little satisfactions of the unexpected discovery’ (2007, 15).

Perhaps feederism simply satisfied Nicole’s virtual curiosity, can I really blame her for that? No.

Though I do argue that curiosity is not innocent, and certainly not synonymous with courage; that intensive sensation immanent to virtual experimentation. Indeed, one might think that stumbling across something odd and striking on the internet, is hardly the same as in ‘reality’. However, I suggest that the internet is a body, an actor in the historical process just like the human subject. As

Buchanan notes, the internet has transformed practically every aspect of contemporary life, especially the way we think about the body and its relation to identity and to place (2007 1). Thus by virtue of ‘cyber travelling’, one becomes or creates a cyber-body; one actualises a virtuality. To re- peat Deleuze’s point made in the previous chapter, also this body might be the fruit of chance (40).

Especially since ‘travelling’ implies together with an intentionality, a creation of relations to space and sensations. I do not suggest to consider bodies actualised in ‘cyber travel,’ and on feederism forums, as actualisations with the same intensities of desire, flows of affect and forces of segmentation. Simply because bodies are becoming internet-bodies, does not constitute homogenous becomings. It is precisely because of the vast differences and breaks in affective flows, which then render some actualisations more expressive and forceful. 51

For Dave and Nicole, their respective bodies had already gone through tremendous metamorphosis prior to the third date. The two met on an internet dating site, thus constituting a digital relation between bodies first and foremost. But it is not only the bodies of the two ‘daters’ which matter here. I suggest that what is pinnacle relation, is that between the human and the non-human. What is

Nicole’s relation to her phone? Or Dave’s to the dating site OkCupid? These relations are what actualise virtual potentials, these are the spaces of difference from which genuine creation may follow.

Thus, what is to be created of the body and its potentials, are necessarily actualised in relations with a non-human body. That is to say that, potentials for body-x and body-y remain unlimited, in so far as human and non-human interminglings produce affective flows of gesture, utterance, sensation and intensity. Which is a potential actualised when ‘surfing the internet’. For Nicole, Dave’s body existed prior to their first physical encounter as an unconditional abstraction of desiring-production.

Conditional Desire

Getting back to Nicole’s article, it is not as if Dave singled out, complimented or ridiculed

Nicole’s oyster eating and shitty joke telling body. Or that he even discussed food or sex! Those bodies of Nicole exist as manifestations of a productive desire, and flows of affect, in relation to the assemblages in which they are territorialised; i.e. that of a first, second or third date. Maybe earlier the two were having oysters and thus, an oyster-eating body was actualised? Who knows… Dave’s fondness of Nicole’s body did not somehow negate her body from its shitty-joke-tellingness. That body is real, it has been actualised in relation to the patio-temporality of the event-assemblage of telling jokes or ‘having a laugh’. That is to say, that the assemblage which becomes the third date — involving going shot for shot on whiskey and culminating in a tangled, laughable embrace — is also entangled in a multifold of relations. These relations go beyond the sexual, and cannot be reduced to a single event, component or intensity. Likewise Nicole’s body, in its materiality to her relationship with Dave, cannot be reduced to a whiskey shooting-body or, in her own words, the body of a 52 fat girl. As a fat or big girl Nicole does not permit herself an ‘active’ sexuality. This spells the hetero-nature of sexuality. Nicole’s body does not embrace a flow of queer affectivity, as such to affect her machinic desire. Instead her desire remains conditional to heteronormative sexuality.

Dave and Nicole’s third date assemblage is a construction of affectivity, that of and on bodies, materials and things. Here desire produces not only the relationally charged third date, but more importantly, the normatively sexualised bodies. Because of the inescapable homonormativity in light of which human sexuality is constructed, these bodies and their orientations are expected to carry a hetero-merit. Thus, bodies here become causal to the date, they do not pre-date or ‘come before’ the assumed hetero-assemblage; but in such an assemblage. This suggests that the desire to be sexual, is not internally, bodily and intimately constituted. But rather materially and relationally bound as;

… an impersonal affective flow within assemblages of bodies, things, ideas and

social institutions, which produces sexual (and other) capacities in bodies.

Assemblages territorialize bodies’ desire, setting limits on what it can do: this

process determines the shape of sexuality, which is consequently both infinitely

variable and typically highly restricted (Fox et. Alldred, 2013)

Now that this conception of a sexuality-assemblage has been laid out, and before returning to

Nicole and Dave’s relation, I wish to echo Foucault’s concern of how sexuality has been historically normalised. This has undoubtedly led to a significant impasse in politically and legally accepted sexualities, and moreover, led to the proliferation of internet-bodies.

Unconditional Desiring-Machines 53

It has been extensively argued by Foucault in his History of Sexuality trilogy, that sexuality has been rationalised following the ‘series of binary oppositions’ i.e. mind/body, that seemed to refer sex to a pure mechanics devoid of reason (1978, 78). Nowhere is this obsessive rationalisation more apparent, then in popular attitudes towards sexual deviances, which are often characterised as irrational. Might it be possible to re-think heteronormative relations as something immanent to the human subject?

One way of going about such a re-thinking, is to begin to think about subjects as desiring machines.

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) For such machines, agency is discarded from its traditional structural- ist category. Instead desire is formulated as a ‘driving necessity’ for the actualisation of creative capacities. It is not desire on its own which replaces agency, but specifically the relations of desiring production, the very flows of intensities which translate to creation. Also, subjects who act and objects which are acted upon, do not remain two distinctly separable, agential and non-agential bodies.

These bodies are not limited to, for example, the human bodies of Dave and Nicole. But, like with the whiskey shots-behind-Dave’s-DJ-booth third date-assemblage, traditional subjects and objects actualise one another through sensory relations. The whisky becomes a body of taste relational to the date, as well as the music being mixed, becoming the auditory-body.

To echo Latour, these human/non-human couplings do not discern or categorise the beings of the pluriverse. That is to say, the assemblages of the auditory and gustatory-body are not immanent to hetero-cultures. Rather, these assemblages refer us to an uncertainty, to a profound doubt about the nature of action. To an uncertainty about human materiality to other animal, plant and non-human entities (2005, 73). In no space is the nature of action more in doubt then in the space of the internet, as Nicole found out. 54

This makes the internet all the more intriguing as a space, as it lacks an overarching moral politics, or ‘thesis’, and anonymity can be upheld to a significant degree. There is no judge. Zones and terri- tories of assembling are vast and without defined borders.Without occupying a tangible, material location, the internet falls prey in almost a romantic way, to the limitless desiring machines to create and to actualise virtualise. This uncertainty resonates with Foucault, who in his preface to Anti-

Oedipus asks perhaps the superlative question;

Informed by the seemingly abstract notions of multiplicities, flows, arrangements,

and connections, the analysis of the relationship of desire to reality and to the

capitalist "machine" yields answers to concrete questions. Questions that are less

concerned with why this or that than with how to proceed. How does one introduce

desire into thought, into discourse, into action? (1983 xli)

To humbly yet bluntly answer Foucault’s query: through boldness. By not pertaining to the cyclical course of thought, discourse and action, — which was perhaps Deleuze’s most significant method- ological contribution to philosophy — one ‘makes real’ and follows the breaks, re-connections and re-assessments inherent in desire. This might sound naive, and surely for those who know what everyone else knows, even unnecessary. What matters is how the affective flows can, but do not necessarily, re-connect desire to another object/subject/aggregate. Now is not the time for rationalisation, but courage.

An Unruly Machine

Nicole certainly rationalises sex. Her body is a sexually normative vessel, and her choice of words indicate the invariable, psychoanalytic, pre-disposition to solving obscurities that are thought to do with the mind. Why would it be difficult to discuss or de-thread a “fetish” which is not per- 55 sonal? I agree that it is indeed difficult to decipher, or even to relatively consider “fetishes”. There- fore lets not! Lets experiment and create new terminology, not restricted to a uniform definition.

However this might be easier said than done. It indeed becomes difficult when ones critical reasoning is ‘psychological,’ or worse, assuming that something such as “fetish” is ‘just the other’s preference. I don't not wish to relegate feederism to a phenomenological preference. I’m also not entirely sure what ‘preference’ Nicole is here referring to. But whatever it is for her, it becomes real in Dave through an utterance. Suddenly Nicole’s desire to produce relations with Dave come to a halt.

Nicole begins to retrospectively regret saying certain things about food, assuming that it fuelled

Dave’s courage. Nicole assumes that until this point, until the queer orientation to her body, her body had assumed one coherent state. Dave touching her stomach, prior to the suggestion of feeding, gains a sexual relation only after the suggestion of feeding. But Nicole’s experimentation the virtual, which began when she signed up for an online dating service, comes to a halt. Cynicism and shock override all else that happened that evening. She writes,

OK, I get it. I’m a fat girl. Cool. In times of quiet financial desperation, I’ve even

entertained the idea of sensually eating Oreos for a quick thirty bucks. But now

faced with the question, I just was not down to turn my favorite hobby into a point of

sexual submission.

(Nicole, 2014; I Accidentally Fell Into the Feeder Fetish Community)

The fact that Nicole has thought about performing ‘sensual eating for a quick thirty bucks,’ is not only indicative of the grand narrative of capitalist ethics, which are ever present in subjective politics, sociality and morality. More so, it is indicative of how these deterritorialised flows penetrate corporeality, thus territorialising bodies. To echo Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘subjective capitalist 56 essence’ of desiring-production, is here bodily revealed (1983 337). These flows which now find their point of coagulation in, and on the body, are once again relational to the ethical hetero-nature of capitalism. It is not through experimentation that these flows locate the body and territorialise it.

Instead, these decoded and deterritorialized flows of capitalism are directly actualised in a codeless axiomatic, that immerses them into the multiplicity of subjective representation (337). That is to say, it is the body which codes flows, orients itself towards or away from differences in representation. This codeless axiomatic, I suggest, produces and actualises in bodies a homo-normative assemblage of ethics, which is at play for Nicole.

What strikes me is the paradoxic position which Nicole seems to assume. On the one hand, she is opposed to a sexual act which does not involve hetero-actors or associations between the lips, phal- lus and vagina. She does not want the event of eating to become a ‘point of sexual submission,’ and thus assumes that submission is inherent to feederism. On the other hand, she has thought about willingly submitting and thus commodifying her body to sensual eating, merely constituting a further capitalist segmentation. In Dave she has met a person who does not see her in relation to aesthetically fetishised, sexualities of liquid-modernity. I suggest that what Dave sees in Nicole’s body, is the capacity of a body to produce sensations and intensities unique to that body-assemblage.

This ethics floods and further segments the body without organs in a very stratified manner. These segments, according to De Landa (2011), are gradual in that they increase and develop, the more the body actualises subjective representation. It should not be mistaken however, like with the body without organs, that these segmentary machines are somehow the foundation or basis of the body proper. Following Buchanan (73), the body without organs cannot be the starting point of any body, it is rather a consequence of it. Thus we may view Nicole’s body — at the moment of Dave’s experimentation, — as further segmenting, by the actualisation of homo-normative structures (De 57

Landa 2011). This actualisation stands like an embolism between two bodies, denying desire to exist outside the phallic-driven, Freudian world of Oedipal motives. However for Dave and his segmentary body, there does not exist an embolism in sexuality, in pleasure and in desire. For Dave, a sensory feel-good factor as the product of his desire, exists totally independent from normative sexuality. As far as unruly desiring-machines go, Dave’s body is a true assemblage of desire unbound.

To reiterate Spinoza’s celebrated question in relation to a body like Dave’s, I ask; what can this unruly machine do?

The Dithering Mouth

Instead of immediately answering my own question, let me first suggest what the ‘rise of the machine’ can tell us. For Kathleen Fitzpatrick,

…the notion of the machine is intended to indicate that the barrier has fallen

between the human and nature, between the human and the not human, between the

subject and the object, emphasizing instead their intimate and functional

interconnection (2006, 72)

How does this reconciliation of binaries play out in our corporeal relations with food and sex? This question, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), could never be answered in terms of functions and singular capacities of the body, but rather in terms of affectivity. Let me here conclude with a comparison, namely, that between feederism and anorexia.

By accepting that all desire is machinic, in the sense that it is productive of relations, potentials and capacities, I’m also accepting that what would be termed by psychiatry as ‘irrational’ desires, now become causal of desiring-production. These machinic desires are also rhizomatic, in so far as they 58 do not fixate on a single object, but an assemblage of relations. Thus for the anorexic - like for the feeder7 - the mouth is unsure of its function proper; its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (Deleuze and Guat- tari, 1983, 1). Thus the hunger-effect for the anorexic, and heterosexual-pleasure-effect for the feeder, are both ineffective flows of production. In other words, these are bodies unaffected by conven- tional affective flows. They are unsure of certain machinic organ-functions. This is opposed to Fe- lice for example, who was discussed in the first chapter. Felice’s hysterical-pasta-seizing-body becomes the product of the hunger-affect, and as opposed to the anorexic body, we see here a body that is sure of it’s mouths function. A body of hetero-merit.

It is the raw intensities of the affective gustatory, olfactive or tactile flows, which establish a relation to food. In turn this relation is what produces the hunger-affect (1997). Thus a hungry body, a reactionary body, remains a body-with-organs. The anorexic-body on the other hand strives at a body-without-organs, as it rejects an affectivity between food and body. Both positive and negative affectivity segment bodies, however, the anorexic’s rejection of affectivity, is a more pronounced rejection of constructions such as family and diet.

This is comparable to feeder-bodies. These bodies desire to produce a blurring, or re-assembling, of alimentary and sexual regimes. The anorexic and feeding-bodies of both respective desiring-machines, ultimately produce bodies that attempt to liberate the body from an insupportable burden of automatic reactions (Buchanan 1997). This is the similarity between the two that I wish to highlight. Deleuze, in his conversations with Claire Parent, elaborates on his conception of anorexia,

7 By ‘feeder’ I mean a person who would count themselves as being part of the feederism community 59

It [anorexia] is not a matter of a refusal of the body, it is a matter of a refusal of the

organism, of a refusal of what the organism makes the body undergo. Not regression

at all, but involution, involuted body. The anorexic void has nothing to with a lack, it

is on the contrary a way of escaping the organic constraint of lack and hunger at the

mechanical mealtime… Anorexia is a political system, a micro-politics: to escape

from the norms of consumption in order not to be an object of consumption oneself…

(1977, 110-111)

Therefore, like the sylphlike anorexic-body Deleuze describes, the feeder-body refuses to undergo or submit to an Oedipal, strictly genitally erogenous sexual politics. It’s desires not to produce affective relations. The feeder-body distances the human from it’s sexual organism. Whereas in psychiatry and psychoanalysis the two have traditionally been thought of as analogous to one another, this is not the case for bodies of feeders. For desiring-machines such as Dave, the bodies’ actualisation of sexual desire exists, and is produced, autonomously from the Oedipal subject. Now, to answer my own question: this actualisation is what an unruly machine can do. It can reconnect erotic or sexually affective flows, across vast planes of assemblages.

Ultimately these flows traverse the desiring-machines themselves, such that they can and do re- connect to other machines. Oral and anal sex, I suggest, could be conceptualised as such a recon- nection. There, the mouth-machine desires an affectivity with the genital-machine, which in turn re- connects with the anal-machine. These machines do not, as Deleuze and Guattari notes, always function smoothly (1983 1). It is precisely in their coarse capacities, that these machines unsymmet- rically re-relate and thus create, actualities from virtualities. If these machines indeed functioned uninterruptedly in a fluid linearity, spaces of differences would cyclically reoccur and change would remain unattainable. It is thanks to feederism and bodies like Dave who prevent this from happen- 60 ing, at least uninterrupted. Desiring-machines never exists as totalities or essences, but rather as dis- rupted subtractions from the assumed totality of the human, as sets of turbulent organs, tendencies, flows and energies. 61

Conclusion: The Next Machine

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and

starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever

said the id. Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines

driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the

necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an

energy source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast

is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it.

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1983 1)

In cinema and likewise in not-cinema, the bodies of the producers, costume designers, actors and the rest of the production crew, are amongst many other desiring machines. These machines desire a production, or productions, of reality. This reality is produced by a human/non-human assemblage of movement, sound, colour, speech, silence , etc. Here, as with all assemblages, the sum becomes greater than its parts. In other words, the assemblage of a business dinner or lunch, cannot be reduced to the bodies of business. Similarly I suggest, a sexuality assemblage cannot be reduced to a sex.

Take for example the scene from Miseria e Nobilita, or indeed in that of American Psycho. Here the desiring bodies and their material bind, form an assemblage that cannot be reduced to the individual bodies or the material environment. The bodies that assemble around the dining table in Miseria e

Nobilita, could be seen as desiring affective relations with one another and with the food pending delivery. This is however not sufficient enough to constitute the machines doing cinema, as Deleuze would put it (1977). 62

These machines are ‘turned on’ if you will, by intensities. Intensities of affect, sensation and gesture, amongst numerous others, create a body-assemblage. Productions of sound, of movement, of identity, of articulation, etc., are all creations or ‘desire manifested’. This applies in the real as it does in cinema, and both involve a genuine creation/experimentation. This is to say that flows of sound and gesture are not discovered or pre-existing. Neither are sexual identities, as bodies do not predate their sexuality. The cinematic conceptualisation is invariably an actualisation of concepts into cinema, or better, through cinema. These concepts might not inherently be ‘cinematic,’ but they become objectively categorised as drama, action, thriller or romance, post-production. Likewise, I argue that sexual identities are not inherently sexual. A queer sexuality becomes sexualised or not, through a relation to a particular body. For example, semiotically being a big girl and ‘just’ fat, immediately deprives the body of a sexuality, any sexuality. With its inherent relation to fetishism, feederism already by definition of being an -ism, relegates feeders to a queer sexuality. To one outside the discursive matrix of the human subject. For me however, what feederism marks is the capacity for sex as not immanent to sexuality. This capacity is certainly not a self-actualising potential. It is produced by desire, but also through rigorous experimentation with the virtual.

The bodies’ capacities to produce creations are as relational to one another, as they to the space in which they actualise - be it on the internet or on screen. This relation creates vital affective flows, which can disrupt or enter into other cinematic or internet-assemblages. That is to say that affective flows are impersonal, and can cross over, disrupt, re-assemble or break other assemblages i.e.. other dining parties, as is the case in the scene from American Psycho. There is a production at play here, the same which re-formulates sexuality assemblages. Hence sexuality, or the desire for an affective- sex, is, I suggest, just as disruptive and brittle in its flows. This was suggested through Dave’s courageous actualisation, and indeed in Nicole’s reaction. However, in legal, medical, political and 63 scientific representation, sexuality remains confined to discovery; not creation. Which is to say that sexuality, is an essence produced in a matrix of hetero-relations. The codeless axiomatics through which sexualisation happens, for me, stand as the constructive site for change. These axiomatics should be challenged! Lets take desire with us and forget normative agency for a minute. Lets take our bodies and desires, and begin to recognise, respect and experiment with those forces that ani- mate our bodies and produce our desires.

Considering the efforts made above to re-think bodies, their relational orientations and re-connections of sexual and alimentary desires, are we now ready answer Spinoza’s question what can a body do? I have certainly not entertained all the vast potentialities of bodies. Neither have I provided a commentary as to what a body cannot do. If this re-thinking would have been able to concrete- ly answer, what it is a body can and cannot do, this paper would no longer carry the weight of a relative materialist re-thinking. The entire motivation for these discussions, postulations and meditations, is firstly to entertain a vital concept of the human body. One which is not bound to a world of phenomenological objects, events and experiences, but can on the contrary become, experiment with virtual potentials and create subjectivities as multiplicities, as opposed to singularities.

Secondly, through cinematic objects I attempted to suggest the arbitrariness of concrete events and orientations; and thus, of nature itself. Which now lead me to ask, what is the nature of nature? I suggest that it is what humans create, sometimes in parallel, sometimes in contention with but never autonomously from, the material-semiotic conditions of the ‘world-assemblage.’ Humans are causal of that around them, or as John Law writes, relational effects that include both the human and non- human (2007 8). Am I then to assume that the world is an inherently heteronormative ecosphere?

That all biological, chemical and atomic complexes operate in a hetero-nature of relations - which 64 just happens to correspond to the groupings of humans, by humans? And would do so, regardless of these cultural projections of form and identity, à la the scientifically distinct human?

The historical contingency of nature is something, which for me, is lacking from popular scientific practice. Even more so, it is lacking from experimental sciences like that of molecular gastronomy.

Humans, like the foods they eat, have not always remained bodies as they appear, sense and gesture in the time of liquid modernity. Bodies of food have not, throughout history, remained ontologically steadfast. It is the relations which actualise matter as food, or rather the ontology of these relations, which remain disputes as well as foldings of, what counts for the human as culture and nature. Non- humans are thus necessary to act the actualisation of these relations, just as much as the human counterpart. However it should also be noted, that it is to the detriment of the human as an anthropological immigrant on this planet, to project form onto matter. This is what Sara Ahmed (2006) warns us from doing! What makes these concrete orientations detrimental, once again, is the immanence of form, to gender, stratify and territorialise bodies. What I have effectively attempted at doing, is to suggest how a re-conceptualisation of desire may de-thread these territorialised bodies; and thus, produce desires that deterritorialise heteronormative flows.

It is the productive capacity of our desire, that of the human desiring-machine, to produce relations.

It is these relations that matter for subjectives. These relations of greater or lesser intensities, constitute the bodily foldings. Relations are also tremendously subjective. Thus something might appear as ‘natural’ to the hetero-anthropos, or as ‘part of its nature,’ when in fact, this ‘nature’ is merely an artefact. ‘Nature’ is therefore experienced in events, in the complex and contingent compounds that orient bodies. For me nature is subjective, however and unfortunately, it is assumed as universal.

For Deleuze and Guattari, this is fundamentally due to the ‘nature’ of the anthropomorphic representations that society imposes on the subject, which they seek to undo via schizoanalysis; the 65 schizoanalytic slogan of the desiring-revolution will be first of all: to each its own sexes (1983 297).

I humbly suggest that this thesis be read as desiring-revolution. A revolution which, as ambitious as it sounds, would allow for vastly creative bodies, as opposed to the docile ones Foucault rightly suggests we are coerced into (1977). This calls for becoming-minor, independent from ‘rationality’.

For that body should no longer remain chained in its dungeon, and, the body-actualised should not remain a mere link, in a continuous chain of homogenous bodies.

If we begin to imagine that such a body is chained, and thus assume a virtual potential for it’s unchaining, we are already moving in the right direction. For my body is just as much a machine, desiring a becoming confined to a dungeon, as the next body and those before me. 66

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