A Pervert’s Manifesto
Michael Williams
Foreword
Equivalent and Singular
Η χειρÏŒτερη μορφή της ανισÏŒτητας είναι να προσπαθήσει να κάνει άνιση πράγματα ίσα.
— Aristotle
Die Destrukturierung hat genauso wenig, um die negativen Sinn für uns der ontologischen Tradition entlastende . Im Gegenteil, es abstecken die positiven Möglichkeiten der Tradition sollte , und das heißt immer seine Grenzen zu beheben.
— Martin Heidegger
Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, wrote a famous book, The Politics (350 BCE), on the different forms of government, divided by rule of the one (royal or tyrannical), the few (aristocratic or oligarchical), and the many (constitutional or democratic). The precept of democratic governance (Aristotle preferred constitutional rule) is equal rights based on property ownership. Aristotle’s claim in the citation confirms his disdain for the strictly democratic system which presents equality as a decree of the governance of the many which is not of absolute authority (unlike constitutional governance). My heed of Aristotle’s words about the mistake of the equalization of the unequal is informed by the topic of this chapter: the general equivalent. The equalization of the unequal and the commensurization of the disparate are the proper functions of general equivalence. This sexual, social, linguistic, and economic principle — of the equalization of the unequal: “to try to make unequal things equal” — is the basal function of general equivalence. But why is standardization of the mismatched and the normalization of the different to be criticized as the “worst form of inequality”? The reason is that the unequal — mismatched and different — object is stripped of its distinctive otherness in the process of the standardization and commensurization of general equivalence. This violent ruination of the singularity — incomparability and incontrastability — of the object may elevate it to the value of the absolute object of the standard, but this process wrecks the unrepeatable uniqueness of the object. The challenge is not to standardize the mismatched or normalize the different in order to facilely generate equality in value. Rather, the task is to equally value the mismatched and the different. The dare is to approach an equality of sameness and otherness rather than an equality of identity and difference. But the more radical venture is to destroy equality itself and the (standardization of) value which arranges the relationships between objects, whether identical and different, or equal and unequal. The destruction of the function of general equivalence in the phallus, the father, the sign, and the dollar is the horizon of Aristotle’s critique of the equalization of the unequal. After equality, the singularity of subjects — of sex, family, language, and economy — becomes visible and practical.
The work of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, is considered the philosophical forerunner to deconstruction. From the Black Forest, Heidegger innovated what he referred to as “destruction” (or destruktion, in the German). This philosophical strategy returned philosophy to the profundity of the ontological question: “What is?” The ontological question about the essence of objecthood is a presupposition of any further philosophical inquiry. The ontological question is nearly primitive. Heidegger powerfully demonstrates that in this primeval moment of conceptual and practical evolution it is impossible to even pose — let alone answer — the ontological question of essence: “What is?” At our primitive historical moment in the early 21st century, the question and answer of the essence of an object is differed and deferred in the traces and chains of a discursive expansion in space and time which is beyond any conclusive Being or presence of what is as such.
In The Pervert’s Manifesto, I illuminate the effect of the ontological necessity to put Being under erasure. The radical destabilization of such splits wrecks the extant symbolic order. The limits of ontology chop words to smithereens. But Heidegger also emphasizes the positive possibilities of the destruction of the ontological tradition. Rather than a principally negative project of dismantlement and disfigurement, Heidegger enunciates an affirmative project whose effort is to fix and isolate the boundaries and borders of an emergent ontology. My project pursues such work. I spend considerable exegesis in a critical appraisal of the extant system of the psychoanalytic articulation of phallocentrism, the deconstructive disruption of the sign, and the Marxist critique of capitalism. But this labor of the negative is redemptively supplemented by the invention of the positive — what I discover in the figuration of the Pervert. The virtue of a critique of the extant system ($-ism) is to clear space for the assembly of an alternative infrastructure. The positive work involves a network of cultural relations and social systems whose novelty for the future supplants the tradition of the past. But both past and future are necessary — ontologically overlapped — as the proviso for opening a scope from the past in order to establish coordinates for fixed boundaries and isolated divisions for the invention of the future. A crucial caveat in Heidegger’s work is that a radical departure from the tradition is unlikely and even unwise. The system is strict and necessary. My passion as a Pervert wills the wholly other — an effort that the late Derrida entreats — but I also settle for the delay of the à venir system. Delay will be suspended. But this is not a reason to renounce the pursuit of the trace of this Other.
The system of $-ism is structured by systems of general equivalence: a system of signification; a system of desire; a system of economy; and a system of (super)egoism. These systems are the quadrumvirate of the foundation of Western humanism and $-ism. The medium of communication, the organization of gender and sexuality, the structure of economic relations, and the arrangement of identity and identification are the foundations of language, libido, capitalism, and the ego. The bet is that there is an isomorphic relationship among these four pillars of $-ism in language, desire, economy, and subjectivity. The claim of this book is that a generalized equivalence — what Jean-Joseph Goux (1968) isolates as the sign, the phallus, the dollar, and the father — structures the fundamental relationships between all objects in $-ism and, specifically, in the system of signs (words) in langue, in the system of heteronormative phallocentric patriarchy in gender and sexuality, in the system of the dollar in capitalism, and in the system of identification in selfhood.
The concept of the general equivalent must be critically elaborated, and the isolation of its functionality must be microscopically analyzed. There are two principle conundrums in the operation — causes and effects — of the general equivalent: first, the consistency of the units of measurement of calculation and evaluation in the comparison and contrast between objects; and second, the generalized substance which is assessed and judged in its presence and absence in two distinct and opposed objects. The theoretical undertones of this book trace these aporias in the central function — generalization and equivalization — in the systems of $-ism in words, cathexes, dollars, and identities. The book achieves an analysis of these systems from the perspective of perversion and its techniques of disavowal.
General equivalence is a function which compares, contrasts, and exchanges objects — identities and differences — in the system. The fundamental operation of this function is its generality. The general equivalent must reduce the particularity of the objects — identities and differences — to a common substance which is otherwise absent in both of the objects. Generality enforces an alien and exterior material and abstract mark on the objects of exchange. This substance is the measure of the value — comparison and contrast — of each of the objects in relationship to each other. This standardization of a foreign and outward substance as the mechanism of calculation of objects formalizes and systematizes the value — comparison and contrast of the general substance — of each object in relationship to the other.
Besides generality, the other component of the general equivalent and its mediation of value is equivalence. Equivalence defines an equilibrium between two objects such that the common substance of measurement can be determined and calculated in its presence and absence in each object. The pivotal necromancy of equivalence is its standardization of measurement. Not only is the common — foreign and exterior — substance isolated in both objects but this substance is measurable and calculable as a value, either in quantification or qualification.
There are four isolatable general equivalents: the dollar in economy; the phallus in gender and sexuality; the father in social relations; and the sign in the language system. Economically, the dollar is both general and evaluative as a common substance in commodities in the marketplace. The dollar is general because it can mediate between all of the objects in the system of capital. There is no Outside of the dollar. All objects and their otherwise singular qualities can be quantified in the value of the dollar. The dollar is evaluative because it determines the price — exchange-value — of each of the objects both absolutely and relatively. An absolute currency value is chimerical because the quantitative price of any commodity is relative to the value of the other commodities in the system: a $10 t-shirt is quantitatively — exchange-value — equal to two $5 hats. The absolute value ($5 and $10) is reducible to the exchange of 2 hats for 1 t-shirt. The singularity — use-value — of each of these objects is nullified in the mediation by the dollar.
The strangest effect of the necromancy of general equivalence is that it — magically — isolates an invisible substance in each object. The $5 or $10 is internal and interior to the object under the general equivalence of exchange-value. The dollar is material and paper — simple — but this materiality is also distinct from the objectal qualities of the goods in question — the hats and the t-shirt. Exchange-value appears to be preternaturally embodied in the commodity despite its simultaneous absence. Not only can neither absolute value ($10 for a t-shirt) nor relative value (2 $5 hats for a $10 t-shirt) be determined by the system — there is no relationship of quality between the singular objects of the hat and the t-shirt — but the embodiment of the general equivalent of the dollar is precisely absent in the materiality of each object. The dollar is purely spectral. It haunts the commodity with a quantifiable value which is otherwise entirely absent from the object itself. The paranormality of the dollar is its manifest appearance in an invisibility in the object. The object appears with dollar value, but this quantified numeracy is purely occult. The dollar is supernatural, and it not only transforms nature into culture — use-value and singularity into exchange-value and identity/difference — but it also converts culture into nature — worldliness of being-in-the-world and being-with-others into numbers, decimals, integers, and prices. The comparison, contrast, and exchange of the general equivalent of currency is a mediator which vanishes — never appears as such — but only manifests in the place it is not: the object. The dollar is not an ordinary object. This is so because it is only valuable when it is exchanged for an object — and then in exchange for a dollar, and so on. The dollar is only present when it is absent. There is no such das Ding as the dollar. The commodity is a material effect of the occult mediation of a dollar whose absence is the condition of the presence of absolute and relative value in a general form.
In gender and sexuality, the phallus is the psychoanalytic concept which metaphorizes qua the general equivalent of sexual difference. Freud contends that “size” and “visibility” explain the distinction of valuation of the penis and the clitoris. The greater size and visibility of the penis determines the superiority of the male sex organ above the female genitalia. Of note is that these criteria for the distinction between penis and clitoris are precisely quantifiable: “size” can be measured by inches and centimeters, and “visibility” can be measured by figure and spatiality. The little boy’s crazed gaze at the little girl’s genitalia in the Freudian scene of the discovery of sexual difference quantifies and standardizes an exchange-value — inches, centimeters, figurality, spatiality — of the penis against the clitoris. This quantification of sexual difference is the origin of the concept of “phallocentrism,” and it indicates that patriarchy is originally organized by mathematics.
The little girl looks, but Freud does not describe any quantified evaluation of her gaze at the little boy’s penis. Rather, in an instant she knows that she is without it — but what? — and wants it — but what? Psychoanalytically, the little boy is plagued with castration anxiety and the fear of loss of his private property of the penis (et al.), and the little girl is structured by penis envy and the desire for substitute objects to make good the loss of her castration. These gendered affective positions are organized by the standardization of quantity — inches, centimeters, figurality, spatiality — at the earliest moments of childhood. Sex is quantifiable. Sexuality is calculated. Desire is a series of integers. The phallus qua general equivalent is a calculator.
Like the general equivalents of currency, the father, and the sign, the phallus is both general and evaluative. The phallus is the ur-penis. It is the standard by which size and visibility is measured by the sexual culture. The phallic standard applies to all of the penises (and inferior clitorises) in the system. The generality of the phallus puts its presence under erasure. It cannot be materially present because there is no absolute size for the superiority of the penis or the inferiority of the clitoris. The standard is mathematically quantified, and for this reason the finite infinity or infinite finity of equivalent measurement cannot be reached in presence.
The phallus is evaluative insofar as it functions to confer signification — better or worse — on the object of its judgment. The strange aspect of phallic evaluation is that “size” and “visibility” are scant categories for standard evaluation. The singularity of the penis and the clitoris are reduced to a nebulous and indistinct set of criteria. Is there not more to say — evaluate and judge — about the penis than “size” and “visibility”? The likely reason that size and visibility rule the phallic standardization of value is that magnitude — size and visibility — are a calculated mathematical measurement which can be applied to the most disparate of objects — the penis and the clitoris.
The father is the general equivalent for social relations. Lacan cites paternal dysfunction as the etiological cause of psychosis. The function of the father in psychoanalysis — either an empirical father or a figural father — is to threaten the male child with castration and death if he does not obey the rules of the system. The father also stabilizes the symbolic order. The combinatory pairs of oppositions in language (et al.) are structured by stability, and the father’s authority and rule balance this structure in order to enforce a system of signification which is legible and coherent. Lacan defines psychosis as the suspension of the father function or the point de capiton which otherwise pins meaning in Reason. The suspension of the phallic function wreaks havoc on the subject whose symbolic order disintegrates from a rational syntax and semantics of distinction and opposition. In terms of social relations, the empirical father or figural father authorizes certain types of relationships — familial, parental, sibling, friendship, courtship, marriage, and so on. The system must order social relationships in a consistent and repeated way — the incest taboo is the central injunction in Western social relations — such that certain relationships are licensed and other bonds are prohibited.
The father as a general equivalent is both general and evaluative. It is general because the father’s authority is neither absolute nor relative but in relationship to other authorities in the culture. The father cannot rule with absolute sanction. His accreditation is conferred by other cultural institutions. The father is himself an effect of The Father whose presence is elsewhere to and otherwise than any empirical or figural father. The father’s law — rules, norms, habits, rituals — is embodied in his subjects, including the empirical or figural father himself. Qua internalized, The Father is the law-giver whose generality in function applies to all subjects as individuals.
The father is also an evaluative function because of the originary “No!” which is experienced by the little boy in his explorations of his infantile sexuality. This embryonic “No!” is the primary structuration of the child’s experience of society tout court. The basal general equivalent of the father is the binary opposition between yes/no and authorized activities and illegal infringements. The father’s authority is decentered and dispersed, and his present locus can only be differed and deferred to the traces of paternal authority — educators, parents, friends, schools, supervisors, bosses, wives, husbands, businesses, and so on — in the ether of the culture. The evaluative criterion of the father’s generality is modestly variable, but the fundamental opposition of yes/no and sanctioned/prohibited is a prerequisite of functionality in the system.
The sign (word) is the general equivalent in langue. Semiologically, the sign is distinct from the signifier and the signified (and the referent). The signifier is the material (sound, mark) component of the sign, and the signified is the conceptual (ideational, abstract) constituent of the sign. The sign — word — is the practical union of the signifier and the signified. The sign qua general equivalent mobilizes its own necromancy. Saussure claims that the material signifier and the abstract signified can only be divided in theory. In practice, the signifier and the signified are always already enjoined as the word. But this practical fact is unexplained. What is the joint between the material and the ideational, and between the signifier and the signified — qua sign?
There is no explanation for the joint between signifier and signified qua the sign. There is no account of the word as such. There is no clarification of practice. There is only the theory of the signifier and signified as different and negative qualities of materiality and ideationality in the absence of any hinge in and of the prosaic word. Equivalently, the sign is the foundation of the system of communication in speech and writing. The sign structures the inchoate and amorphous nebula of sounds, marks, and ideas in the system. In the absence of the sign, the system degenerates into a chaotic gobbledygook of anti-signification.
The sign is both general and evaluative. As general, the sign is the form — but not content — of all of the semantic units of meaning in langue. As evaluative, the sign is the foundation of the series of binary oppositions which animate speech and writing. These binary pairs are arranged by value — greater or worse — in relationship to the standard of the sign. The sign is also a unit of exchange — general equivalence — because its traffic and trade in metaphor — is like — is authorized by the system. The sign is comparable and contrastable with other words, and this exchangeability stabilizes a system which is otherwise thrown out of joint by the suspension of the phallic function and its enforcement of coherence and precision on the sign.
But the sign qua general equivalent is also not present as itself. The architectonics of the word is the chaos and mayhem of the signifiers and signifieds in negative and differential relationships of value. There is no Being — as such — in the sign. The ordinary responsibilities of the sign are consistently threatened by the bedlam of the basal signifier and signified and their fragile system of value in negation and difference. The word is precisely not itself. The sign is always already elsewhere to and otherwise than itself. Like the dollar which is absent in exchange, and like the phallus which is absent in its ideality, and like the father who is absent in his differed and deferred authority, the sign is absent in a system which speaks and writes its simultaneous appearance and disappearance.
The critical work in The Pervert’s Manifesto is framed by this system of general equivalents of currency, phallus, father, and sign. At stake in these functions and their generality and evaluation are the parameters of the (im)possible in the system. This Manifesto is enflamed by a passion for revolutionary transformation. Critical exegesis is a central component of its procedures for a dramatic and comedic transfiguration of $-ism. The Pervert is the figuration of the future character who wills a posthumanist selfhood and sociality. Economic, sexual, social, and linguistic relationships are the pivotal center of this revolutionary transformation. The extant system of $-ism is summarized by the system of equivalence in comparison, contrast, and exchange — the reduction of singularity to quantified standardization and general evaluation. The future system must identify economic, sexual, social, and linguistic relationships which ruin the functionality of equivalence. This standardization otherwise reduces singularity to equivalence.
There are several wretched troubles with equivalence. First, general equivalence erases presence — Being — of any object in the system. Equivalently, any object is exchanged with any other object based on the calculation of quantified value. Second, these functions generate their own internal contradictions. In economics, the dollar can only expand value in the creation of debt. The dollar must be balanced on a ledger, and the addition at one point in the economy must be subtracted at another point in the economy. Any expansion of value in the economic system is floated on debt and loss. In sexual and gender relations, the phallus cannot account for sexes and genders which do not properly fit the extant criteria of “size” and “visibility” (and so on). Any emergent sex or nascent gender is illegible to the quantifiability of the standards of the general equivalent of the phallus. The consequence of the revelation of an expanded set of sexes and genders is the disintegration of the internal criteria of the phallic regime. In social relations, the authority of the empirical and figural father is ultimately subverted by the diffusion of sovereignty in the culture. As the father disappears as a mere arbitrary but conventional silhouette of dominance, the social (and economic and sexual and linguistic) systems dissolve into the Outside of the parameters of Reason. Linguistically, the sign cannot sustain its functionality because it is always in absentia in a system of difference and negation — différance — such that any word is precisely what it is not. Every word is the same word. This system explodes the proviso of speech and writing. Communication cracks, and the random disorganization of sounds, marks, ideas, and abstractions overwhelms a “speaking subject” who is quickly subordinated to a “spoken subject” of gobbledygook. The Pervert’s Manifesto articulates the breakdown of these systems — problematics and contradictions — in order to forge a futural antihumanist passage toward the revolution unto the Real of a messianic selfhood and sociality. The Pervert’s Manifesto is my own Baedeker, but its line of flight is for the pink ostriches under the sand and the yellow barons on the high grounds. Together — tout autre!
