Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [126]
Et Cetera Et Cetera
Even our definition of sex has been reduced to a biological system of physical intercourse and genitals, with its repeated proof of existence evidenced in the orgasm. In this reduction, however, sex has been handed down its own death sentence, since in the strict biology of the orgasm, the only proof that it ever existed is in its ending.
If we want to reclaim sex as something enchanted and mysterious, what we need is a challenge to the current course of things. Something to divert us from where we are and lead us aside into a world that still contains the mystery before sex was repackaged, commoditized, and outsourced as desire and biology. According to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, what we need is not desire, but seduction (se-ducere: to take aside, to divert from one’s path).
Seduction’s enchantment puts an end to all libidinal economies, and every sexual or psychological contract, replacing them with a dizzying spiral of responses and counter-responses. It is never an investment but a risk; never a contract but a pact; never individual but duel79; never psychological but ritual; never natural but artificial. It is no one’s strategy, but a destiny.80
Seduction challenges the sex-killing anatomical reduction by being a game without end, without regard to intercourse or the orgasm. What In Rainbows does so well is excavate the problematic nature of the current course of sexuality and offer a penetrating aesthetic consideration in the wake of this receding Enlightenment.
Fifteen Steps then a Sheer Drop
Enlightenment sexuality is understood in terms of the individual and Natural Law, but seduction reminds us that sex is never about the individual and always about the interplay of relation. This dizzying feedback loop of seduction creates the possibility for sex to break from individualized sexuality, dissolving the need for the individual-as-subject because “there is no active or passive mode in seduction, no subject or object, no interior or exterior: seduction plays on both sides, and there is no frontier separating them” (p. 81). What should have been circular all along, simultaneously playing on both sides, has become a flat earth, where, as “15 Step” reminds us, you can never end up back where you started.
The duel horizon of seduction, then, can be understood as a feedback loop with no concern for traditional subject-object mediation or meaningful acts in search of the real. Instead, seduction becomes “an ironic, alternative form, one that breaks the referentiality of sex and provides a space, not of desire, but of play and defiance” (p. 21). This play and defiance is the hope seduction offers the age, a game and a revolution.
I Am Trapped in This Body and Can’t Get Out
For Baudrillard, there’s no greater display of the Enlightenment’s sexual reduction than in pornography, where headless bodies or genitals confirm the truth of sex to an era convinced that sex is nothing more than a scientific exchange of genitals, repeatedly proven by the orgasm. Why not fill the screen with the only things that matter in sex? In essence, pornography is a scientific and close-up version of intercourse, as one might find in a laboratory under a microscope.
The common belief about pornography is that it is an avenue for fantasizing about sex, but Baudrillard is convinced that “the only phantasy in pornography, if there is one, is not a phantasy of sex, but of the real, and its absorption into something other than the real, the hyperreal” (p. 29). He contends that in pornography, we’re searching for real sex, based on our belief that sex can be reduced to a Natural Law of physical intercourse. In the end, however, this approach to sex only delivers a simulacrum, a simulation of the real.
Pornography is the High-Definition Television of sex. The irony implicit in the idea of HDTV is that its aim is to reproduce