12 October 2009: "Not sure if I ‘get’ the goal of ‘magazines.’"

This post is about ritual orgy. Carles notes that "Magazines seem like they ‘try too hard’ to generate discussion" -- that discourse has a generalized forced felling as if it is being produced to mask the expression of a deeper truth. He may have in mind the transmogrifying libidinal economy, considering the covers he choose to illustrate his point.

In L'erotisme Bataille explores the crisis of coitus: "Sexual activity is a critical moment in the isolation of the individual. We know it from without, but we know that it weakens and calls into question the feeling of self.... The material basis of the crisis is the plethora." By this, he means the "superabundance of energy" that initiates sexual behavior and seeks its own expiration, in the process annihilating the boundaries of the self in the surge toward reproduction, destroying the illusion of continuity and providing the foretaste of death.

Carles may have Bataille in mind in his concern with the flood-tide of pornography, now spilling into other graphic arts in a high-profile semi-pornographic magazine. IS this the accursed share de-eroticized through a radical conflict directly with sexuality's commercial equivalent? Sexualized sexuality, a cartoon of sexuality, already its own fetish in a vetiginous recursivity, a plethora of plethora that seeks to destroy the excess by channelling the super-abundance into a more sterile form of viral socio-sexual image production?

searched the internet for nude pictures of the Simpsons, and happened to find a ’shit load’ of cartoon porn. Like graphic pictures of tons of characters doing ‘the kraziest shit possible’ to one another. It seems to indicate that there is already a niche of fans who are interested in seeing the Simpsons nude/performing sex acts.

Nonreproductive sexuality is taken to its logical endpoint -- voyeurism vis-a-vis representations of sex among cartoon characters -- as a defense against the reproductive, self-annihilating nature of the sexual impulse. Carles asks rhetorially, "Are cartoons for people who ‘live in a fucking dreamworld’ (no matter how trendy & progressive they are)?" A dream world of fucking, not progressive but transgressive, anarchic, an overabundance that surges beyond the containing mechanism of cyclical fashion distractions. The fucking cartoon, an oxymoron or a koan?

Carles is dismayed to see this ultimate psychological defense mechanism co-opted by media companies whose preveious efforts to siphon off the surplus have lost their effectiveness: "Playboy appears to be utilizing this Simpsons gimmick just 2 try to sell magazines to ‘people who usually aren’t interested in Playboy’ since showing C-list celebrity breasts no longer makes the Playboy Brand a valuable asset/resource to our society." Appropriating images of human sexuality, Carles suggests here, no longer suits the post-human society of late capitalism.

Bataille predicted this: "In the human sphere sexual activity has broken away from animal simplicity. It is in essence a transgression, not, after the taboo, a return to primitive freedom. Transgression belongs to humanity given shape by the business of work." Hence Carles asks the natural question: "What’s the ‘kraziest shit’ u’ve ever tugged off to?" The answer is not pertinent, what matters is that we think of sexuality in terms of extremity rather than generation, and with a diligent perspicacity. "Wild cries, wild violence of gesture, wild dances, wild emotions as well, all in the grip of immeasurably convulsive turbulence." What could these worlds of Bataille possibly signify, Carles implicitly asks, other than a media-cartoon orgy?