Everything is Permitted, Nothing is Possible: How you murdered your father and ruined sex for everyone
The Atlantic recently ran an article on the declining rate of sex in general amongst young people. The tagline is ‘Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.’ As Anna Khachiyan points out, sexual recession is a coinage which accidentally cuts to the heart of the problem, but it’s not despite the easing of taboos that people are having less sex, rather because of it.
To understand this we need to return to the mid twentieth century, to the emergence of a sexual revolution, and to Lacan. When we use Lacan’s framework for desire we can characterise the Free Love Movement as a transgression of American conservatism qua Symbolic Father, the ideological system which dictates the nature of a society’s prohibitions, and therefore the nature of its desire to transgress them. For Lacan, prohibition is what generates desire for enjoyment, jouissance is the enjoyment of transgression. We break rules because rules are there to be broken. For 1960s counter-culturalists, nothing was permitted and everything was possible.
History isn’t linear and it hasn’t been smooth sailing to a sexually liberated utopia since then; there have been cultural stumbling blocks, but on the whole the trajectory has been a distinctly liberal one. In principle we’ve destroyed the necessity for a nuclear family, for gender norms, for normative relationship structures. As a child of the internet I realised at age 13 that I could pretty much see anything I could imagine with only a search engine and a few minutes. People can now gain access to anything, anywhere, anytime, and it doesn’t even have to be human. The Japanese have spearheaded the project of attempting to replace each and every component of a human relationship with technology. It was in part their response to the the impossibility of human connection in a technocratic and hyper-driven economy which led to notable alienation. We can have anything we want with the tap of a screen, so, far from asking why we aren’t happy, why aren’t we enjoying ourselves?
One protagonist of the Netflix series Maniac, Mantleray, is a high-achieving but alienated scientist leading a revolutionary experimental drug trial. He is at the frontier of human experience. He is also lonely, fatherless, has a Lynchian relationship with his mother and is unable to articulate his desire for his research associate. Early in the series that associate walks in on him, shamefully in the throes of a masturbatory experience with a sprawling virtual reality set-up. Every component of sex is sublimated to the best of its ability into the gadgets, the fantasy on the screen, but Mantleray expresses something closer to agony than pleasure. His abandoned apartment is in decay, and he is alerted to the interruption in a pathetic frenzy to conceal the act. This struck me as a powerful illustration of the exhaustive and futile masturbatory exertion of a culture which can no longer climax. It can’t climax because it doesn’t desire. It doesn’t desire because it annihilated all the gods which enabled it to in the first place. It’s limp-dicked, swiping endlessly through suspended impressions of sexual objects which exist as no more than the most concentrated fantasmatic projection of the person behind the profile, unable to choose one because, as the cruel joke goes, the overabundance of possibilities tends to have an atrophying effect.
Dating apps are a hyperrealisation of the fact that sexual relations are fantasmatic per se, only they tend to trap the user in an unending process of avoiding foreclosure. One can literally remain in the fantasy indefinitely, never making a choice. Ironically, newer apps like Hinge and Badoo market their uniqueness as being modelled on something resembling actual historical social relations: we meet each other through the expansion of our immediate environment. Such a revelation perhaps anticipates social platforms coming full circle, never having needed to go anywhere at all.
So what does this all say? Well I’m not a luddite, and I’m not a social conservative, but I think context is key. A sexual revolution has ultimately failed if it has succeeded in liberating the human subject from the shackles of religious and social oppression, only to dump her in an environment where everything is permitted but nothing is possible. Japan should be a cautionary tale. In a neoliberal culture which commodifies everything from your ideas to your sexual proclivities, in the words of Alain Badiou, the freedom to buy things is no freedom at all. If freedom is at least partially defined as the freedom to experience joy then joy is just as potentially found in arranged marriages where the freedom to choose isn’t part of the equation. What I’m arguing for is a reassessment of the neoliberal definition of freedom, which would have us believe that enjoyment is realised in exponential excess, when the study of human beings clearly suggests otherwise.
Title harvested from Angela Nagle: http://www.patreon.com/posts/22753177
Pixels and scene referenced: Episode 3 of Maniac: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80149397
Originally published at girlgotakeyboard.wordpress.com on November 23, 2018.
