Perversion the Social Relation

Fatal West 23out in the next paragraph to have been merely a theatrical production,the alligator a costume and the jungle a backdrop on stage. So, we areleft asking, is there actually some access to the lizard brain, and, throughit, some immediate access to total bodily enjoyment, or is the passageonly a metaphor for a kind of experience Burroughs hopes might be possible?We seem to be caught in a familiar Burroughs contradiction, suchas we just saw with the opium, where the literal and the metaphoric areinterchangeable. However, the enjoyment is real (Farnsworth is fuckedby Ali in both situations, though we might ask whether fucking is literalor metaphoric), and Farnsworth's enjoyment connects the two worlds,acting as a switchpoint between reality and the stage. The Real question—boththe question I want to pursue and the question of the Real—is what might squeeze the "smell," so intimately strange, out of your ownbrain and thereby give you access to that ancient sense?Perhaps the contradiction is more accurately an opposition betweendelusion and illusion, hallucination and artifice (what we mistake astruth versus what we recognize as constructed), and not between whatis real and what is merely staged. The Real by definition is not open toperception, not directly available to the mind operating in the symbolicrealm. We respond to representations, whether we understand them tobe true or fictive. Although enjoyment may once have been evoked bythe direct experience of stimulation that presumably floods the infantbody, for the speaking person it is mediated by repetition: each subjectis constructed by events that must be symbolically restaged as fantasyin order to create enjoyment. 7 Reality, in this context, refers merely tothose experiences of the world that we fail to notice as staged. That is,we hallucinate a Real based on the images we perceive, as the sucklingchild hallucinates "milk" at the sight of a breast. Those who would kicka stone and say "there is reality" betray a desire for a Real as immediateas a rock.When we seek some experience of sublimity, we look to extremity,whether outward to the grandeur of the natural world or inward to theraw passion of, say, sexuality; but neither the Grand Canyon nor themost intimate sexual acts occur for us unconditioned by previous expectation,images, stories—by theater. If we still derive the sublime thrill,it is because we forget the staging or because, like perverts, we give ourselvesover to the fantasy. Too much or too little, that is always the prob-