5 August 2010: "Totally Alt Performance Artist squirts Spaghettios out of her vagina"

This post is about das Ding. Carles asks a deceptively flippant question: "If you had a vagina, what would u put up it to represent society?" But this seemingly innocuous feint in truth interrogates not only the whole of the construct of phallologocentrism in patriarchal society but the feministic representations of that construct that only serve to trivialize or reinforce its hegemonic power.

The thrust (pun intended) of the performance art piece Carles explicates is that the female sexual organ is often the channel by which her insertion as subject into patriarchal society is most starkly achieved; that is, vaginal canal is not merely a passage by which society is literally reproduced and over which control by the powers that be must be guaranteed to perpetuate their regime, but it is also an informatized conduit that conducts the semiotics of domination by the phallus, which, as Carles suggests, "represents society" in its phallologocentric guise. The bodily insertion of symbolic forms into the very critical organs of the reproductive process transfers the process of semiosis to the body itself, the order of the symbolic is indeed "written on the body" of woman, underwriting the entire process of signification for the established order of hierarchical and gendered social relations. A bond of analogy is formed between the reproductive process and the semiotic process, a union, a fusion of practices, such that one may easily be translated into the other.

This makes the irruption of the phallic -- whether it take the form of a can of processed and branded pasta, the abject slurry of the pasta itself loosed from its container, or some other form -- into the politicized womb space an Event, in Badiou's sense, yes. Carles concededs that "maybe she’s right, words are bullshit. We are just covered in feces & lil pasta Os in a sweet marinara sauce." Sociohistorical processes as the excrement of collective action; industrially manufactured commodities to sustain life as a form of living death; the symbolic itself as abject; the contingencies by which biological requirements manifest in repressive forms and authorize domination, and so forth.

But the recontextualization of the womb as a networked node also allows sexualization and subjectivation to function as processes of elaboration of shared social languages in which the relations of domination adhere. As Kristeva writes in "Some Observations on Female Sexuality" the phallus is overdetermined as a signifier in its own right to represent inscription, the marking of the law:

Many authors have noted the specific features that destine the penis to be cathected by both sexes to become the phallus, that is, the signifier of privation and lack of being, but also of desire and the desire for meaning -- all the components that make the phallus the signifier of the symbolic law. Visible and narcissistically recognized, erectile and filled with strong erogenous sensitivity, detachable and thus “culpable,” capable of being lost -- the penis is, by this fact, suited to become the medium for difference, the privileged actor in the 0/1 binarism that forms the basis of all systems of meaning (marked/unmarked), the organic maker (therefore real and imaginary) of our psychosexual computer.

Carles obviously had this passage in mind in calling attention sardonically and reflexively to "my ‘liveblog’/'livevlog’ of the performance," drawing parallels between the penis as "psychosexual computer" and the technological gadget as perhaps the apotheosis of the phallic device, epitomizing the simultaneous experience of presence and absence, the fundamental lack and the effort to fill the lack with communicative gestures that only delineate desire without resolving it.

Hence, Carles is critical of the artist's efforts to introduce lalangue into her performance, which, as already accessible to digital reproduction, is always already assimilated to the phallologocentric code:

Things were pretty chill, but then she got serious and delivered some sort of manifesto that eventually broke down into weird phonetic murmurs. Think she was trying to ‘transcend’ human language, and trying to get into some animalistic jargon vibes.

Carles pointedly represents her gruntings not as explosions of infantile presymbolic murmur but instead as fragmented abbreviations of common terms from digital culture: hro, p4k, bzzband, etc. Rather than transcend language and its freighted meanings, her efforts merely reinscribe the problematic of patriarchy as it replicates itself in networked society. Lalangue, semiosis are reduced to "jargon" -- the most advanced form and yet emptiest form of the symbolic, the purest instantiation of hierarchy in language.

Naturally Carles draws the only possible conclusion from the artist's being trapped in literalistic praxis: he confesses that he was "worried that she was going to cut off her clitoris to represent having ‘no more pleasure in her life’" -- in other words, that desire as embodied in ordinary language, even as it reproduces patriarchy, even as it metaphorically fills the vagina, also provides pleasure and stimulates the erogenous zones, as it were. A radical scission -- an intervention at the level of the physical body -- may succeed in rooting out sexual basis for the reproduction of domination in language, but in itself remains a communicative act, and thus still reiterates the mode of the phallic law. As Carles suggests, to speak from the body yet not reproduce the phallic code requires more than using a vagina as the vocal organ.