Dualism bad.
Friday September 7, 2001
And yet, it’s thoroughly engrained in how we think about the world. If it’s not the one, it must be the other: good or evil, light or dark, crunchy or smooth, Sondheim or Webber, God or the Devil, black or white, man or woman (or boy or girl), gay or straight, friend or foe, left or right, lawful or chaotic, digital or analog, Mac or Windows, for or against, up or down, you or me, us or them, porn or erotica, fucking or making love, normal or perverse, paper or plastic, Plastic or Metafilter, win or lose, over or under, capitalist pig or anarchic hippie, frankenfood or neo-Luddite, repulsion or desire, old school or sell-out, fool or genius, books or television, beginning or end, on or off.
The trouble is, it’s an incredibly limited way of structuring the world. This or that. Even a passing familiarity with some of the more ancient tools of logic affords you far more complex tools for tinkering; even something as dazzlingly simple as Greimas’s semantic rectangle (four nodes, instead of two, and a cheeky delight in imagining combinations of those nodes) can dash the scales from thousands of eyes when Kim Stanley Robinson sticks it in a novel. —Yes, it’s a neat toy. But it’s Structure, with all the seductive weaknesses of any Structure—any Pattern. Four nodes; taking into account obverse and reverse as well as converse (or is it vice versa?); looking at the borderlands—a definite improvement over simplistic, binary dualism. But it still isn’t complex enough to map what happens when five people try to decide where to go for dinner.
So dualism is limited—but it’s still of value when used properly. (As this computer proves.) I’m vaguely remembering something from Annemarie Schimmel’s Mystical Dimensions of Islam, which was a textbook for one of my ex-housemate’s ex-classes, so I can’t go dig it up and check my references; you are, once more, at the whims of my fallible memory. She points out (or quotes someone at length pointing out) that any mystic’s path must end in one or the other of—essentially—two mutually exclusive goals: to become one with God by uniting one’s self with God, to achieve that ineffable moment when you’re moving with the universe, not against it, and all is right with everything; or abnegation, being “naughted in the belly of the whale Annihilation so that no rumor of you might ever reach the shore” (and that may not be the quote at all, but that’s how I remember it, so)—to destroy the self in union with, for want of a better word, God.
Sex or God; mysticism or eroticism. It seems to me that that division is also a perfectly valid way of (broadly) splitting approaches to pornography, and the erotic: on the one hand, you have those whose characters seek to—as it were—move with each other, and who usually try to expedite things for their characters (their fantasy figures, if one is feeling uncharitable). Oh, there’ll be enough obstacles here and there to make the story interesting, but the ultimate goal is to get it on—to move with Pornotopia, say, instead of the universe.
The other hand: abnegation. Self-destruction. Through bliss or degradation, it doesn’t matter; the point is to go somewhere you can’t get back from, and sex (such a little word, really) is the way you’re going about it. —Or, at least, long-winded bloviations re: same. If, that is, one is feeling uncharitable.
But watch yourself—watch the imposition of positives and negatives, of good and bad. Use the tool; don’t let it use you. Sure, the first category might seem positive at first blush: Mark Aster, say, whom I’d consider squarely in this category, is downright wholesome. But I’d put Emily in here, too, and most snuff fantasies, and I might start pointing out how the sex-positive proselytization can sometimes come off as sexy as a civics lesson. And while the second may seem downright destructive, negative, dark and wrong, I’d point out that it’s what O wanted, what Beatrice found, and as for Humbert, well…
(Is it as simple as asserting the self on the one hand, and destroying it on the other? No. Certainly not. But remind me to bring up Delany’s dialectic of “I love you/do you love me” and sadism and masochism at some point.)
(Name them? I barely want to touch them—they make me nervous. Too easy to parcel everything up in two neat boxes and not think about it again. I’m not going to name them. —Besides, I haven’t had any clever ideas.)
(And though I can think of a number of reasons why, it’s interesting that most of the examples I can think of worth mentioning of the former come from the “amateur,” free internet market; most of the examples of the latter ditto from the “professional” erotica market.)
Back to the semantic rectangle: it might well prove profitable to map the four corners of Pornotopia onto it, and see what lies in the borderlands and combinations. Brave New Arcadia; Lord of Jerusalem—