At 10:30 PM -0600 25/5/03, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>For the term
>  has been very narrowly defined, so that many think may think
>  an erotics of poetics implies the erotic is one's subject matter.

This inability to distinguish one from the other has probably been
the aspect of this discussion that has most amazed me, since it's
hardly a novel idea - there are plenty of people who heeded Sontag's
call for an erotics in place of a hermeneutics.  I thought it was one
of the staples of post modernity... And yet, you bring up the subject
here and it's like a particularly brain dead high school class,
complete with sniggers, nudging and "acting out".  Perhaps, to avoid
hysteria and distress to the those of tender brains, an erotics of
poetry should be practised only in private between consenting adults.

I have been considering the strangeness of this whole discussion,
which takes place in my email program, which is also clogged with
spam.  In between the endless mails asking me if I want a bigger
penis, or prescription free Xanax, Viagra and Valium, there are all
these headers about Hot Teens or Spanish Sluts or Fuck Their faces
And Spurt Chunks All Over Them or, worst of all the other day, See
innocent Iraqi women fucked by American soldiers!  I haven't found a
way to filter all of it out, so some always makes it into my inbox,
and so every time I get my mail I spend a bit of time deleting before
I actually read anything.  I don't suppose my inbox is atypical, and
I wonder how much this stuff bleeds into my awareness, and how much
it colours the readings which occur in this virtual space.

The pornography advertised in my spam is routinely misogynist,
revolving around the (often violent) humiliation and/or rape of
women, the idea of "innocence" being an invitation to violation, the
male eye being the dominant and dominating fixation.  And the
connections between pornography and anxiety and aneasthesia are
surely obvious, or they are in my mailbox: the Valium and the Viagra
go together, in this condition of hypersexualisation, which simply
the idea of sex, but not any reality.

And here I am, in this context, wanting to talk about the subtleties
of the reading and writing of poetry in terms of erotics, a charged
metaphor for affect, cognition, whatever it is that happens when I
encounter poems.  I guess it is inevitable that the spam conditions
in some cases how such an argument might be read; or that the spam is
only symptomatic of a wider idea of priapic, agressive sexuality
driven by anxiety or paranoia, which is not about sensory
sensitisation but anaesthesitisation...  the exemplar being the sex
addict who injects the drug right into his penis so he can fuck as
many women as he wants, although he doesn't feel anything and is
incapable of orgasm.  Which is an extreme of aneroticism and self
hatred.   And our times are aggressive, about the trampling of human
particularities in the name of gross abstractions, money, generalised
ideologies like The West or Islam... in her book, Regarding the Pain
of Others, Susan Sontag makes the simple point that war is something
men do: and it seems to me that the dehumanising of misogynist
pornography is not unconnected to the dehumanisation that exists
everywhere, the sexual violence, the racism, the bludgeoning with a
blunt instrument, while the cock stands triumphant over all, like a
flag pole.  Erotic?  No: it's the ultimate in anerotics, the
aesthetic of the snuff movie, where sentimentalisation, the numbing
of feeling, meets its ultimate expression, the pornography of death:
it's on our tv screens and our computer screens and in our emails and
in our eyes and our ears, inescapable.

Well, I still want to speak of (an) erotics of art.  It is possible
that given the context I have outlined, such a thing is not possible:
it is dependent on the assumption of a mutuality that perhaps no
longer exists or is, at the least, seriously distorted in whatever
context it finds itself except, maybe, the most rigorously private.
The hypersexuality of nosex invades the possible mutualities of
eroticism; and what is left then is a fixation on the crudest
definitions of sex and sexuality.  The result is an entrapment of
eroticism and the consequent entrapment of erotics in a space
circumscribed by misogynistic and violent presumptions, a panopticon
of the human soul.  It's an unstoppable spiral of lacks.  Well, poor
human beings.

At the same time, I wonder if a consideration of erotics (as opposed
to eroticism) might be a way through this, a way of subverting the
narcissism, a way of articulating a resistance.  But what chance does
the delicate have against the crude?  Well, I don't know; but I am
after all, a poet.  But it's been interesting.

best

A
--


Alison Croggon

Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/

Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/