Semiotics of Orgasm
David Gilbert
Coming in French
To begin: a scene in a porn video. A tawny-haired woman writhes on top
of a man. She speaks in a strong French accent. She says łFuck me harder
‹ oh, oh, yes, yes, yes!˛ and łIąm going to come!˛ Then the orgasm
begins. Her physiology changes: her face flushes, her back arches, her
full lips hang open. She begins to speak again, but her voice has
changed. She speaks too softly; we cannot hear her words. But it is
obvious that she is speaking French. The change in languages ‹ from
English to French ‹ parallels the changes in her physiology. Speaking in
English was an effort for her; as the orgasm overcomes her, the effortless
slip back into French is a release for her; it resolves the tension
created by the strange speech which Anglicizes her very body. The
wave-like motions of her orgasm are the round, undulating flow of her
Gallic tongue. Her speech is instigated by the physiological changes that
her orgasm brings; yet it also allows orgasm to take place. It opens up
the linguistic field in which orgasm, for her, is coded. For the network
of signifiers reaches beyond the brain-stem down into the periphery of the
nervous system, it places its yoke upon the musculature, and dictates the
engorgement of the genitals according to its own fetishes. Her jouissance
cannot be translated. She comes in French.
It is my intention in this essay to show that orgasm, far from being a
purely biological phenomenon, is always constructed in a communicative
context: first, taking my cue from structural linguistics, I will argue
that there can never be a pure orgasm, an orgasm-in-itself outside of
language; second, as an example, I will analyze the different ways in
which female orgasm has been constructed in this century; and third, I
will suggest that orgasm, while governed by discourses, nevertheless opens
up an uncontrollable semiotic field in which the history of the subjectąs
pleasure is revealed.
Scholarship treating sexuality as a social construction has proliferated
since Freud. Research into the nature of the orgasm is not new either:
sexologists, psychologists, and physiologists have, especially in the
latter part of the century, treated orgasm as an object of scientific
study. The fruits of this research have been some impressive biological
descriptions of orgasm, and to a lesser extent the identification of
certain evolutionary or sociological purposes which orgasm serves.
Nevertheless, a treatment of orgasm, not merely as a biological phenomenon
or a tool of evolution, but instead, as a symbolic construction, has, to
my knowledge, not been attempted. Foucaultąs grand History of Sexuality
describes how the sex act has been regulated by various hegemonic
discourses, and even intimates that the character of the sex act itself is
governed by these discourses; yet Foucault makes no attempt to describe
how the character of the sex act itself changes under the influence of
different discourses: what is important for him is how discourse
structures the system of rules and rituals which govern the sex act ‹ and
how discourse maintains these structures. But the act itself, for
Foucault, is essentially the same, whether it occurs between a classical
Greek man and his boy lover, or between Christian marriage partners. What
I intend in this essay is to describe how the sex act is never the same;
how the very experience of orgasm itself differs according to different
communicative contexts.
Returning to the crucial moment of the film, we find that the interaction
is dominated, not by the actorsą words, but by their ecstatic
vocalizations. The womanąs sighs and moans, as surely as her words, are
coded. They are messages borrowed from the code of a particular sexual
rhetoric: one which authorizes the femaleąs self-abandon, and constrains
the male. Her extended cries of pleasure ‹ which signify her
self-abandon, submission, and being-acted-upon ‹ are punctuated by the
manąs staccato grunts ‹ ejaculations (pardon the pun) which signify his
self-control, dominance, and action. She says łFuck me harder ‹ oh, oh,
yes, yes, yes!˛ The underlying message she communicates is łI am the
passive receptacle for your force; you are the one who performs; I do
nothing except urge you on in your performance.˛ Further proof that these
phonetic expressions of pleasure are coded lies in the fact that they can
be employed in the absence of their referent ‹ that is, orgasm can be
faked.
The woman in the film comes in French, from her vocalizations to the
variegated movements they engender in the musculature of her neck and her
abdomen, to the very experience in consciousness where the surge of
nerve-impulses and neuro-transmitters connects her speech to the
sensations of her own body ‹ and those to the linguistic and cultural
edifices which, toujours déja, regulate her pleasure.
But her speech does not, as a logocentric account might construe it,
simply reach down into her own body to connect with her nervous system ‹
in a reciprocal gesture, her body reaches up, and speaks itself through
her. Examining the film sequence, it occurs to me that the code resides
not only in the brain (in Saussureąs terms, the psychological part) but in
the body as well. For the rhythm of the actorsą vocal interaction flows
up, expressing the motion of their bodies, synchronous with their
respiration, muscle contractions, etc.
The signifiers follow a speech circuit which is not bracketed between two
heads, but which, conjoined with their nervous systems, streams down and
traverses their entire bodies before flowing back up to the conduit
connecting their heads. Between the reception of one message and the
transmission of another, information cycles through the periphery of their
bodies, and is doubtless transformed in the process. Observing this
circuit, it is clear that the message does not emanate totally from the
head (psychological part).
That language, in part at least, comes from our bodies was hinted at by
Nietzsche in his discussion of the difficulties of translation:
What is most difficult to render from one language into another is the
tempo of its style, which has its basis in the character of the race, or
to speak more physiologically, in the average tempo of its metabolism.
(Nietzsche 40)
Certain feminist thought also locates language in the body, or at least a
certain kind of speech. Helene Cixous, in her explication of the ecriture
feminine, describes a sort of speech which łtraverses the body˛; and
Elizabeth Grosz describes a kind of feminine writing which flows directly
from the body. To better understand the relationship between language,
body, and orgasm, we need to examine the formation of the human subject.
Freud provides a good starting point.
The infant, as Freud has said, is łpolymorphously perverse.˛ In other
words, its sexuality is unhampered by taboo, by conditioning, by
self-consciousness. The infant lives in a world which is free of symbolic
language ‹ its entire body is eroticized; the symbolic mapping that will
come later will section off those parts of the body that are reserved for
pleasure, and those that must serve a more mundane purpose. But the
infantąs body can be thought of as Jacques Lacan describes it, as a
phallus ‹ it is in its entirety a sexual organ. The bliss of infant
sexuality is both wordless and formless. By favoring certain parts of the
infantąs body and ignoring others, the mother begins the mapping of the
infantąs body, begins the process of forming from the formless matter of
the infantąs body the body-for-a-subject that it will become. She
interpolates, into the wordless scroll of flesh, the characters that will
constitute the infantąs body as a text ‹ a text which the human subject
must carry, like a catalogue of its earliest ecstasies and agonies, till
its very death.
It was Wilhelm Reich who first understood that the subject carries its own
history in the body ‹ in its posture, its movement, its gesture. This
history, moreover, is not authored by the subject, but primarily by the
mother, and secondarily by the father. Lacan has said that the subject of
psychoanalysis should attempt to discover how his mother felt about his
penis, about defecation, and so forth. In the subjectąs body can be read
the story of the mother ‹ her proclivities, her fetishes, and her
revulsions; overlaid, of course, by the story of the father in similar
way. In other words, Reich, though he did not use the term, suggests the
body can be read the like a text.
Hence it was naďve of Reich to adopt as his guiding metaphor for the body
that of the bladder. Just as the properly functioning bladder expands
with the intake of fluid, and then, at a certain critical moment,
contracts and discharges the fluid, Reich thought of orgasm as the
expansion and contraction of the entire organism. According to his theory
of orgasm, orgasm functions to discharge the build-up of łorgone energy.˛
We need not take issue with Reichąs hypothetical orgone energy; here we
need merely to observe that he posits an idealized orgasm ‹ one which he
is at pains to prove that any one of us is capable of having. For Reich,
once we dismantle the łbody armor˛ that prevents our bodies from expanding
and contracting freely like a healthy bladder, we can begin to have ideal
orgasms.
But Reich did not perceive the inherent contradiction between his
observation that the human being bears within the body a personal history
and his ideal of restoring a fallen innocence in which the body operates
as a pure, biological mechanism. Reich is thus unable to grasp the
indelibility of language ‹ that the text inscribed in a living being can
only be altered ‹ edited, if you will ‹ not erased. Reichąs body armor
can never be dismantled, for the body armor is constituted by language.
And the body can no more be free of language than can the mind. Alfred
Korzybski put it aptly when he stated that symbols are imbedded in the
nervous system. Thus the łorgasm-in-itself˛ is unattainable. Reichąs
ideal orgasm is the culmination of German Idealism filtered through
Freud: there is a continuity between the eidos, the Vorstellung, and
Reichąs perfect orgasm ‹ the latter being no more than a reformulation of
the former concepts in biologistic terms. We can get a clearer
understanding of how language mediates orgasm by examining how the
construction of female orgasm has changed in this century.
Anne Koedt, in her widely-read essay, łThe Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,˛
places the same strictures on female orgasm which have long been imposed
on male orgasm. Koedt, whose opinions are reflective of clinical
discourses on female sexuality, privileges the role of the clitoris in
orgasm to the exclusion of the rest of the genitalia. She denigrates the
vagina as a pleasure center, and even cites sexological research comparing
the sensitivity of the vagina to that of the anus, which, we are to
assume, is incapable of transmitting pleasure. It may be noted here that
certain gay male discourses would, of course, take issue with this
devaluation of the anus; the present inquiry, however, is not concerned to
dispute the facticity of discourses, but only to suggest how they shape
the body in an economy of pleasure.
In a period ‹ which extended into this century ‹ when a woman was told
that, to be a respectable woman, she must not have an orgasm, she didnąt.
Today, if a woman is told that she will not have a vaginal orgasm because
such things do not exist, she wonąt. If woman is told that her clitoris
is a little penis, and that she must have orgasms there, like man must
have his in the penis, then she will experience orgasm in the spasms of
her newly-discovered little penis. But there are further rhetorical
consequences of accepting the clitoris as a little penis. For it brings
female sexuality one step closer to being co-opted by the well-entrenched
rhetoric of male sexuality. If the vagina is de-eroticized and becomes,
in Koedtąs topology of the body, simply a tool of reproduction, then woman
borders dangerously close to becoming what she most does not want to
become ‹ a lesser version of man. Woman risks being described as the one
with less hair, weaker muscles, and a smaller penis.
Despite certain Victorian or prudish discourses, other discourses on
female sexuality have told women to experience full-body orgasms. These
discourses have centered around the total eroticization of the female
body. She shaves it, bathes it in exotic oils, and lavishes attention
upon it with cosmetics and such. Her entire body is eroticized to a
degree which far surpasses that of the male. Thus it would follow that
the female is allowed to feel pleasure in a greater part of her body; her
orgasms are allowed to extend throughout the periphery of her body;
(indeed, man has hoped that they extend even to her very soul, terrified
that she might be, in fact, just as wanton as himself.)
If woman accepts her orgasm as the spasm of her small penis, she risks the
de-eroticization of the rest of her body. The moment that womanąs
sexuality is relegated to a penis, her orgasm is governed by the economy
of pleasure which governs male orgasm. No longer will she be allowed to
experience an orgasm which belongs to the older discourse, which told her
that her bliss emanates from deep inside her: a bliss to which she must
surrender her entire body, which shakes her whole being and discharges
itself through the pores of her skin as well as through the vocal
ecstasies of her sighs and moans. Following the common masculanist
discourse, she will have to learn to hold herself rigid in the
goose-stepping cadence of the male ‹ left, right, left, right, in, out, in
out; she will have to learn to stay in control and grunt.
Though we have seen that orgasm is constructed by discourse, it can never
be completely controlled by any one discourse ‹ and perhaps this one
reason why, even in the freest of societies, it is still a dangerous
thing; for it always threatens to collude with licentious significations.
Orgasm frequently disrupts the concentration on the sexual object, for it
opens up a semiotic field which not even the subject can control. The
signifier that is the object of desire, be it a picture, a voice, a
memory, slides out of view to reveal a vast layer of sedimentation beneath
its surface. Orgasm threatens to strip away the crust and reveal the
strata from which the libido emerges, like mantle, surging upwards as it
meanders its way through the nervous system ‹ which is the corpus of the
subjectąs language, the fossil record of its signifying network ‹
eventually reaching the subjectąs most abstracted and refined passions (as
exemplified by the ecstasy of St. Teresa), yet only by passing through the
libidinal history of the subjectąs most primitive fixations.
But in general, orgasm is not experienced by the subject until it reaches
the highest level of abstraction, which is the level of awareness, the
level of the signifying chain which the subject iterates, or plays in
consciousness like a looped magnetic tape, meditating upon it like a
mantra. Only then is the nervous system allowed to transfer its contents
to consciousness; only when the synapses code their chemical messages in
parity with the provisos of the receptors is the uptake of pleasure
permitted.
Hovering just below the orgasm ‹ which can now be understood as a demand
placed upon on the nervous system by consciousness, in response to the
demand placed on consciousness by the nervous system ‹ the chemical text
of the bodyąs periphery (which is the linguistic system that formed, from
the dark matter of the infant, the human subject in the full bloom of its
particularity) is subjected to a reading from which can be discerned the
history of the subjectąs jouissance. This evidences the full tragedy of
female circumcision: the history of the subjectąs pleasure is erased.
The practice of female circumcision destroys not only the female subjectąs
capacity for future pleasure ‹ it denies her access to the history of her
own subjectivity, which is stored in the library of her flesh.
Like a subterranean root system, the record of the subjectąs sexuality
acts as a conduit between the raw information which is the substance of
orgasm, and the orgasm as experienced by the subject. When these roots
are unearthed during orgasm, either intentionally or unintentionally, the
conscious chain of signifiers gives way to the vast network of unconscious
signifiers buried beneath it, protruding out from it in magnificent, if
not terrifying, filigrees. If observed carefully enough, these signifiers
may reveal themselves in a whole host of images: a breast, a mother, a
father, a sibling, a favorite toy, a terd, a piece of candy; even in the
expectation of a surprise, a particular sequence of numbers, or the
connection of one idea to another. In the dream and the compulsion this
dark, subterranean signifying network reminds us that it is always there,
nurturing our most lofty and sanctified desires.
Gordon Fitch
word for orgasm. This would be interesting if <true>.
(Even English and French (for instance) are somewhat
deficient in this regard, using common words with other
meanings in the colloquial (come, jouir) and learned
Graeco-Latin in formal mode.) Of course, as soon as we
start talking about "orgasm" or anything else we start
to (re)construct it, so I'm not sure how far we can get at
the <truth> of it.
--
>< Gordon Fitch >< g...@panix.com ><
ETTINGS
male orgasm because
of its visibility--it is a cinematic optic spectatorial event,
whereas the female
orgasm must make itself visible to the camera through certain
exaggerated
physical undulations and visible expressions. The
physiological and linguistic
changes undergone by the female are for the sake of visibility,
cinematic
representation. A man does not have to scream and change
languages
and register any physical complications because his orgasm is
the visible
cum shot, the shot that always concludes the scene and toward
which all
actions strive. The male orgasm is the climax of the scene and
after that
there is never anything left to represent but the development
of another
sex scene. The porno film is more suited to the representation
of male
sexual desire because it is a desire fulfilled visually,
visibly. Where would we
be if the male cum shot were also invisible. This is why soft
porn is so
soft--not because the female doesn't cum but because it doesn't
permit
the visualization of the male orgasm.
Orpheus
>word for orgasm. [...]
Well, may be...you know, though, that there is some way to
express the idea...that is, if the speakers of the language
are aware of the act...and, given that natural language is
a very informal thing, not official but by nature colloquial,
so it is very hard to know that a "word" does not exist. Having
a specific word for an event is also different from having
an accepted *term* for the same thing. A *word* is a *lexical*
thing more so than a *concept*.
I remember when Reagan said "I'm told that Russian has no word
for 'peace.'" Mir...?
>(Even English and French (for instance) are somewhat
>deficient in this regard, using common words with other
>meanings in the colloquial (come, jouir) and learned
>Graeco-Latin in formal mode.)
Someone recently told me that the latin word for "come"
is used to refer to orgasm. (It was regarding a joke
relying upon the term *veni-vidi-vici*.) If this is true,
then latin languages might have borrowed that tradition?
>Of course, as soon as we
>start talking about "orgasm" or anything else we start
>to (re)construct it, so I'm not sure how far we can get at
>the <truth> of it.
As soon as we experience it, we begin to construct it in our minds...
Operant conditioning depends on us having a marker of sorts connected
with a postive feeling. When we year for it, we firm up the definition...
when we speak of it...we're probably in the locker room with the guys! :)
-t
--
"Meet me in the middle of the day,
everything's okay,
let me smell the moon in your perfume..."
Gordon Fitch
| Yes, this is a problem with the conception of male orgasm. I personally
| believe that men are multi-orgasmic (that is, the engorgment of the
| genitals and the excitiation of nerve impulses is probably comparable in
| terms of number of repetitions per sexual act to that of women [in fact an
| accurate graph of male excitation would probably not show the one large
| peak that comtemporary sexology maintains if tests were performed without
| the male-orgasm-is-ejaculation bias which governs discourse on male
| sexuality]). ...
A few years ago I suggested that this particular view of
male sexuality might have been influenced by the capitalist
ideology of production, or of pre-capitalist, militaristic
ideas of struggle, crisis, and conquest. If so, the
inhabitants of some tribal societies might construct sexual
practices differently, which is why I brought up the matter
of the absence of a word for orgasm in some languages.
--
>< Gordon Fitch >< g...@panix.com ><
Tristan Riley
David Gilbert <da...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
> I would suggest that many of us who watch porn
>films scan them for these fleeting moments, and couldn't give a damn about
>cum shots. After all, as the Victorians knew and Shakespeare evidenced,
>to cum is to "die," and anyway, who really wants to define the telos of
>sex as an act which within a matter of seconds results in flacidity?
Surely some alt.pomo-ite is now going to cite Bataille and Sade a
lot in response?
Please?
Tristan
***********************************************************************
Start the day by dying
Jocho Yamamoto, Hagakure
***********************************************************************
Andy Perry
da...@mail.utexas.edu (David Gilbert) wrote:
>
> Yes, this is a problem with the conception of male orgasm. I personally
> believe that men are multi-orgasmic (that is, the engorgment of the
> genitals and the excitiation of nerve impulses is probably comparable in
> terms of number of repetitions per sexual act to that of women [in fact an
> accurate graph of male excitation would probably not show the one large
> peak that comtemporary sexology maintains if tests were performed without
> the male-orgasm-is-ejaculation bias which governs discourse on male
> sexuality]).
Tiresias would disagree.
--
Andy Perry "This life has been a test.
Brown University Had this been an actual life,
Dept of English you would have received instructions
Andrew...@Brown.edu OR on where to go and what to do."
st00...@Brownvm.bitnet -- Angela Chase
Gordon Fitch
| > Yes, this is a problem with the conception of male orgasm. I personally
| > believe that men are multi-orgasmic (that is, the engorgment of the
| > genitals and the excitiation of nerve impulses is probably comparable in
| > terms of number of repetitions per sexual act to that of women [in fact an
| > accurate graph of male excitation would probably not show the one large
| > peak that comtemporary sexology maintains if tests were performed without
| > the male-orgasm-is-ejaculation bias which governs discourse on male
| > sexuality]).
Andrew...@Brown.edu (Andy Perry):
| Tiresias would disagree.
Some Tiresiases might agree.
--
>< Gordon Fitch >< g...@panix.com ><
PR...@cunyvm.cuny.edu
da...@mail.utexas.edu (David Gilbert) says:
>
>.... That the whole male experience is predicated on
>"struggle, crisis, and conquest" sounds right to me. What are some
>alternative constructions, and within what sort of rhetoric do we find
>them?
What about transgression... as a reaction to the social, arising from
taboo, instead of a purely private drive or need which must be
mechanically deposited. The male orgasm, while it may tend toward a
climactic moment, does so in relation to broader circumstances rather
than as an act of isolated will. This then makes intercourse much more
diffuse and not simply genital... but mounts in relation to other
circumstances which, in turn, dislocates its focus... perhaps, at times,
loosing it all together.
The implication then follows that any society which fosters excitation
because of taboo rather than in spite of it would have a broader way
experiencing a "male" orgasm.
My second question concerns Lacan. Lacan argues that identity is formed
as the child separates from the mother. Although both sexes go through
this process, the degree of estrangement required to generate
masculinity is greater. How might the violence of De Kooning's Woman
series or surrealism, for example, reflect the social extraction of men,
as a function of masculinity, into dislocating and oppressive
institutions of power... and this extraction would also mean the
narrowing of the male orgasm... the move to abstraction...
I have wondered if these images, as well as perpetuating situations
which are disadvantageous to women, also
provide testimony to controls over male behavior by rationalizing their
sexuality in greater detail; reducing it. The never ending process of
violence and estrangement, which tends toward castration, is the portal
through which masculinity perceives femininity...
From my understanding of post-structuralism, it seems that there are two
routes one may go in deconstructing the male orgasm... and there is, of
course, some overlap. One may either equate masculinity with the very
institutions that "men" have struggled to escape from, or, on the other
hand, might qualify masculinity as a mere variation of femininity; a
false distinction. In the first case, the male orgasm is somewhere
between an essentially bad thing and a lie... a weapon. In the second
case it is something which arises out of a feminine reality principle...
however uncertain, ambiguous, and decentered that principle might be.
Both of these approaches don't address "sexuality" as it has targeted
the intersections of many groups.
It is also interesting to think of masculinity as lack... which is how
I see this discussion so far.