Daytime Emissions
Visions of excess: the history of the body, its sweat and blood, deposited into the bedroom, as the material remnants of the past allotted to the archive. Yet, unlike the archive, the bedroom exposes itself to rhythm of daylight and night. Nocturnal emissions, the pathos of “dissolution,” become traces uncovered in the day. The trace discharged upon the bed adopt a new relation, in which place becomes defined by its latent history. How do these bodily emissions correspond with the space of the room: in what way is eroticism defiled by the environment of the world?
When shown around a stranger’s house, there is usually a sense of hesitancy at the threshold between the landing and the bedroom. Once the staircase has been ascended, an awkwardness emerges, guarded by the entrance. The threshold is enforced not only by the border of intimacy, but also by the coverage of a hidden history which refuses to be reconciled with the surrounding house. I am not at all concerned here with anything like the notions of “disgust,” which derive from the Catholic heritage of Bataille. The architectural links between taboo and transgression belies a tedious circularity, in which the transgressive aspect of space depends on a mutual enforcement of taboo. This false consciousness fails to grasp the relational appearance of the bedroom within a given context. I would suggest that the ambivalent entrance to the stranger’s bedroom is clarified if we take it from the perspective of an adjoining window:
If the bedroom is an entrance into a place at once central and marginal to the house itself, then seen from the outside, it becomes animated by a reciprocal bond between an embodied perspective and the vision of a place which becomes the extension of desire. The view from outside literally stretches into the inside, such that the flesh of the world becomes amplified. Merleau-Ponty: “A sight has sexual significance for me, not when I consider…its possible relation to the sexual organs or to pleasurable states, but when it exists for my body, for that power always available for bringing together into an erotic situation the stimuli applied, and adapting sexual conduct to it” (p. 181). Merleau-Ponty’s worldhood of sexuality is a history of the body in is immersion in the world. But the history is not a mechanised history of stimulated responses, but a record of desire spilling into and out of place.
Traditionally, the bedroom is the emblematic space in which time is momentarily seized, either by sleeping or sex, yet at the same time operating on a different plane the day after. In this respect, sleeping and sex mark a division in time, whereby one place closes down as another opens. Given this, how does the shadowless environment of space, which yields only an uninterrupted day, find its way into the architecture of eroticism? Just as sleeping and, as Heidegger would have it, a “good death” appears as out-of-place in homogenous space, so sexuality enters into a tense relationship with a transitional environment. I am thinking here, above all, of the spatiality of airports, service-stations, shopping malls, and train carriages.
On the one hand, in these places, boundaries between the surrounding of the world and the event of desire are effaced by the constant exposure. On the other hand, it is precisely because of this exposure that the spectral quality of public sex is realised. How, if the time of transitional place is the time of all-time, is singular time seized when the threshold between time and place is effectively erased? Being seen, it would seem, is also a form of contained, if not heightened, intimacy. For this reason, public sex is literally an uncanny event: it is a residue, spatial and temporal, of an act which breaches time and place, so forging a peculiar relationship between body and world, framed by the gaze of others. If there is a taboo to this act, then it is not question of the morality of indecency but of the warping of temporality.
Labels: body, DBS, Merleau-Ponty, place, sex, site, time, voyuerism
posted by Dylan Trigg at 11:27 PM
2 Comments:
What are your thoughts on reading in bed? We don't generally read in bed. My wife, the voracious reader in our home, never does. It just feels out of place. But once in a while, during the day, when the light is good from the north, I slip into the bedroom to read. I won't call it a defilement, but there is a vaguely onanistic pleasure that comes with reading in bed, a revelry in transgression, perhaps.
When I see couples reading in bed in the movies it feels wrong. I often take it as a sign of a dysfunctional relationship, which sometimes it clearly is. Maybe it's a writerly fantasy. Could be a metaphor of sheets, or of inscriptions. In the end I can't be sure of how to interpret it.
Interesting point. My friend recently gave a talk on how environments affect our sense of reading, with particular focus on reading on the toilet. A fine talk. I think one of the reasons why toilets and train journeys are so harmonious to reading is because of the passing motion (literally where the toilet is concerned). It seems to me that this kind of movement—the rhythm of movement—provides a context in which reading can come to the fore.
On the other hand, I’m not keen on reading in bed either. It may have something to do with the cultural associations which you point out—the dysfunctional silence. The image of reading in bed as a cosy pleasure which one “curls” into is also alien to me. I tend to make no difference between reading a map and reading philosophy, even literature. Perhaps I’m a bad reader. I wonder if reading in bed while ill may provide some kind of (transgressive?) disturbance of this sealed immersion into reading, if only because illness forces us to the bedroom during the daytime, just as sexual desire does.
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