A Pervert's Manifesto
Michael Williams
Prolegomenon
Perverse Manifesto of Manifestos
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody’s got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died.
— Leonard Cohen
I’m the end of the family line.
— Morrissey
In his song, “Everybody Knows,” Leonard Cohen imagines the possibility of an Hegelian Absolute Knowledge. This telos at the End of History is a time in which “Everybody Knows.” Everybody now knows — the desires of the people, the truths of the society, and the entirety of the ontological order of that which is as such. The Hegelian system in which “Everybody Knows” is a closed chain of signification. The subject is encircled by a series of common references and identical experiences. The first lyric in the cited stanza that everybody knows is “the boat is leaking.” This simple metaphor recalls lack and loss and the Something is Missing of the clitoris around which phallocentrism and capitalism encircle in the narcissisms and aggressions of castration and the scarcity and supply/demand dynamics of exchange.
The next lyric mentions the captain who, we can agree, certainly “lied.” But the precise essence of this fib is in question. In this study, I will examine the Pervert’s fetish which involves a (dis)simulation of knowledge. Perverse disavowal enables this captain of the fetish to both acknowledge and deny a quantum superpositional perspectivalism which illuminates a manifest lie. This fib is generated by its simultaneity with its other. The lie is not a lie, and it may be hazarded that the boat is not leaking. The schizophrenic economy of the system is such that the captain may have lied — but only in order to tell the truth. The boat may be leaking the Something is Missing. The lack and castration of the Real hole in the symbolic text is the essence of the system as such.
The next lyric about the “broken feeling” amidst the leak and the lie refers to man’s affective response to an Oedipal subjectivity which suffers its life and death in the wake of the Something is Missing of a leaky boat and a deceptive captain. The artful brilliance of the Pervert’s curious approach to sexual difference and castration illuminates that the lie of the leak speaks the truth of the future of the system. Neurotically, the boat is leaking and the captain lied. This speaks the neurotic’s truth and repressed content which are structured by the reality principle. In contrast, the Pervert disavows — acknowledges and denies — in a creative approach to reality. Perversely, the boat is not leaking and the captain’s lie is a (dis)simulation of the freedom and necessity of a castration in the system. This (dis)simulated castration is the proviso of the (mal)function of $-ism. But the system certainly leaks, the father surely lied about its dysfunction, the rest of us patently feel unease, and all of us feel like our father or, as Cohen says, our dog, just died.
The explicit metaphorical note on which the stanza ends — “like their father or their dog just died” — returns to the title of the song: “Everybody Knows.” The system of $-ism may be plain and simple, like Dupin’s note. For sure, Everybody Knows. Everybody knows the truth of the system: that the boat is leaking, that the captain lied, that we’ve got this broken feeling, like our father or our dog just died. We know, Everybody knows. The question is: why has this knowledge of the radical glitch in the system been disguised by us. Why have we concealed our own truth? Why doesn’t everybody know what everybody already knows? My book endeavors to understand the strange blindness to our gaze. Everybody knows — but why not?
In his song, “End of the Family Line,” the singer-songwriter, Morrissey, quietly announces that he is the end of the family line. These words publicly announce not his own personal choice and individual destiny but a violent attack on the family line and the heteronormativity of reproductive futurity. Morrissey sets his voice against legacy, tradition, and continuity as a system. To be the end of the family line suggests that lineage and legacy are finite and restricted. There is a telos from start to end. Morrissey is the final gizmo on the line of personal and social production. The extant mode of production of the family will end, and a new system of invention will displace the tedium of legacy, tradition, and continuity. A configuration will arrive which is the Outside to the heteronormative family and the reproduction toward the future. The line of the tradition will wither, and the zig-zag of the newfangled will issue.
The Pervert’s Manifesto performs a break between the old and the new, the tradition and the novel, and the conservative and the progressive. My critique of humanist $-ism and its transition toward the playland of perversion marks the end of the family line of man and the Becoming of the messianic tout autre of the not-yet. This messianic arrival of the Other can only be reborn in the ashes of the end of the family line. What is the responsibility of this last man — Morrissey — as the final widget to arrive off of the conveyer belt in the happy accidents and tortured contingencies of his life toward the last breath of humanism and its antiquated man? The futural death of the neurotic and his scattered ashes must be swept up into the glorious futures of the Pervert and his sisters and brothers. My work is a pedagogy of perversion. The book instructs the simple neurotic in the talents and techniques — futures — of the Pervert. The end of the family line is the start of the — Other. The dying last breath of man is the living first exhalation of the Pervert.
The Pervert is a master of — slave to — textuality and the series of metaphors and figures which decenter the literal and denotative dimensions of the signifying chain of signifiers, signifieds, and signs. As a fetishist, the Pervert makes meaning and garners pleasure in the substitution of les mots et les choses — props and costumes — in the place of the retroactively fabled maternal phallus. The Pervert recognizes the storied loss of the past — the mother — and the series of metaphors and figures which he substitutes for an imaginary plenitude. Past looking, the Pervert gestures and motions toward the syntagmatic explosion of the metaphors that happily strive to suture the wound of this loss. Future looking, the Pervert cites and notes an absence whose textualization — Praxis of the symbolization of the Real of sexual difference and the maternal totality — is mapped by the bricolage of the metaphors and figures of poetry and prose.
The Pervert takes pleasure in textuality, and he enjoys the substitution of words for words, phrases for phrases, sentences for sentences, paragraphs for paragraphs, and bright presence for dreary negativity. The structure of metaphor (simile) forces an identity between difference — “My love is like a red, red rose” of which “love” and “rose” are distinct and opposed signs. The Pervert gets off on the simultaneity of identity and difference. He enjoys the parallactic overlap and gap of the speech and writing of symbolization. The Pervert’s jouissance is the pleasure of the differential repetition of citations. The Pervert is the figured persona of a thinking, being, and living of metaphor and its space and time of the slash and wound — and suture and swaddle — of the break between the word and its differed and delayed signification. The Pervert occupies the space in-between the past word and its future articulation — and the future word and its past articulation. The Trieb of the Pervert moblizes toward the distant and veiled horizon — à venir — of the destined retroaction of this past (present) and present (past) and future (past, present), and beyond. The willed citation of metaphor (simile) is the Pervert’s alphabets, words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and so on — of notes.
A Manifesto of manifestos — or a manifest metaphor for a latent manifesto — invites the reader to a genre of both exceptional and notorious lineage. The origin of the word “manifesto” is the Italian word Manifesto, which is derived from the Latin manifestum, which denotes clear or conspicuous. The first use of the word in the English language is from 1620, and since then it has evolved as a genre with a variety of source material, often political or artistic but also scientific, professional, and technological. The word “manifesto” generally refers to an oral argument that is then published in text. It is considered a statement of the author’s perspective. The subjectivity of the writer is at the center of the creed — which is the word to describe a religious manifesto. The work promotes either a received idea or a novel perspective. The author of the manifesto traditionally outlines a future course of revolutionary action — political, artistic, and so on — which is the vision of the author and his political and social commitments. There are thousands of renowned Manifestos written in a variety of Western languages, and these include the notable The Communist Manifesto (1848) in which Marx and Engels observe that the specter of communism is haunting Europe. There is also Valerie Solanas, who shot Andy Warhol, and her SCUM Manifesto (1968) — “SCUM” refers to the Society for Cutting-Up Men — which details the chromosomal male defect and the monstrous social consequences of the biological inferiority of men. Donna Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto (1984) envisions a future of hybridity among man, animal, and machine. The United States Declaration of Independence (1776) is rightly considered a manifesto, as are the various manifestos of the artistic movements of Dadaism (1918), Surrealism (1924), Symbolism (1886), and Cubism (1912). The manifesto is a storied genre of spoken to written text, and I want to say that this book is a manifesto in the Spirit of Solana’s SCUM Manifesto (1968) because I utterly despise the object of my critique and I dream of a society not unlike her own vision: free of money, at the end of death, collectivist and relationalist, and cool and happy. But there is a marked difference between Solana’s attitude and my own. I like boys.
