Manifesto for Postmodern Sadists 2.1 by the Marquis

A new millenium dawns. The total transformation of all culture, language and politics is no longer a utopian phantasm of the Left. This transformation is instead a constant global praxis which takes place at speeds in excess of 50 megabytes per second. Postmodernism offers us many important tools for understanding and interpreting this change: an incredulity towards metanarratives (Lyotard), a skepticism towards rationalist semiotics (Baudrillard) and a hostility towards the straight, white male Cartesian subject which has colonized all discourse since the Enlightenment (everybody). The cyborg (Haraway) becomes the key figure of sexuality in our electronic, post-gender world.

When two of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century--Bataille and Foucault--devote significant space in their work to reading the Marquis de Sade, we can, we must listen. But we must go beyond Sade, using his discourse of transgression as the Node Zero of a new kind of network. Our network is rhizomatic (Deleuze): every point in it--passion, pain, politics--can and must be linked together. It is a vast desiring machine whose parameters are without limit. It is this network which will dream of snuffing an economic, cultural and semiotic system which grows less bearable each day.

"To give the system a gift to which it cannot respond save with its own death" (Baudrillard)--that is the only strategy that makes sense today. The postmodern sadist understands that there are only two ideas which stand outside political economy: death, and the gift. Our discourse combines both. By giving the gift of death we create a form of symbolic exchange which is the radical Other of Capital. The enemy has many weapons: culture, ideology, reason, the state. We have only this humble gift, but it is enough, because "every death and all violence that escapes the State monopoly is subversive; it is a prefiguration of the abolition of power (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 175)". The postmodern sadist is first and foremost an anarchist. Of course this means that we denounce all attempts by the allegedly democratic U.S. Congress to silence us. But it means much more than that. It means that we will fight the machine of Capital with a fragmented, dispersed, centerless multiplicity of machines, an anti-machine called Usenet. Let the capitalists quake in their boots as we joyfully give pornography away. Our anarchism fiercely opposes the State, Capital, Consumerism, Puritanism and anything else that would stand between us and our pleasure.

Like the Parisian revolutionaries of May, 1968, we understand that revolution must be total. It must occur on the symbolic level as well as the political. The revolutionaries of May scrawled slogans on the walls of Paris; we scrawl them on the nodes of the Web. They knew that "humanity will only be happy the day the last bureaucrat is hanged with the guts of the last capitalist." We know that humanity will only be happy the day the last commodified Playmate is hanged with the guts of the last alienating supermodel. They burned cop cars and flug paving stones at the pigs who opposed them. We say: hang a cop.

The revolutionaries of May '68 understood the symbolic power of détournement. They knew how to turn a reactionary image into a revolutionary one, transforming meaning in an instant. What they did with spray paint, we do with Adobe Photoshop. Our postmodern détournements make a mockery of political economy and its pathetically archaic semiotics. Consider the idea of copyright, for example. Capital wants to create an Orwellian world in which thoughts and ideas can be owned. And perhaps it can do so--but only in the universe that extends from Gutenberg to ARPANET. Today copyright is laughable. It is an affront to good sense, and even the most basic détournement makes this obvious. Is this a picture of Shauna Sand? Is it a picture of Supergirl? Of course it is neither. Is it a collection of zeros and ones which defines the image of a hyperreal woman who cannot exist? Is it part of a snuff circuit which heralds the tortured demise of capital? Perhaps. Who owns this image? Certainly not the young woman whose face is represented here--if indeed such a woman exists, and if indeed this image can be said to "represent" anything at all. Does the image understand that some vague and distant part of its heritage might possibly be found on a piece of glossy paper? Does it care? Perhaps this image belongs to the computer artist who labored upon it. Then again, perhaps it belongs to all of us.

"Political economy only exists by default: death is its blind spot, the absence haunting all its calculations. . . .An infinitesimal injection of death would immediately create such excess and ambivalence that the play of value would completely collapse" (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 154). The writings of the Marquis represent an attempt to carry out this bold Baudrillardian experiment. Can one truly end political economy by dreaming of the tortured demise of Playmates? It is quite clear by now that there exists no quantity of bullets or of dialectic which can smash capital and the state. But might there by a number of orgasms sufficient to the task? Until now, the information infrastructure has not been sufficiently sophisticated to permit an answer to this question. But a new configuration has emerged. Picture a vast network of brains, T3 lines, cunts, cocks, microprocessors. Picture the entire planet linked together in an unstoppable electronic dream of torture, fucking and anarchy. Can any mere nation-state survive that? Can Bill Clinton's flaccid blow-job scandal-effect possibly compete on this symbolic field?

Why supermodels? Because the supermodel is the ultimate commodity, bought and sold daily in a hundred thousand supermarkets. The supermodel is now perfectly aware of this, and no longer makes the slightest attempt to conceal the role she plays in the econo-semiotic order. Miss July 1998 Lisa Dergan: "It's not like I'm modelling a product. In these pictures I'm the product, so I want to put an extra effort into it." By invoking postmodern sadism against the figure of the supermodel, we refuse the tyranny of the commodity. The running dogs of consumerism instruct us to purchase Claudia Schiffer or Kate Moss or Christy Turlington; we respond by dreaming of their tortured demise.

This space should contain a picture of self-proclaimed commodity Lisa Dergan. However, Playboy Enterprises Incorporated has employed the repressive, bourgeois American "justice" system to prevent the Marquis from placing scans of Playmates on this site. This action clearly reveals the dark core of narrow-minded corporate greed which lurks beneath the surface of Playboy's empty "free speech" rhetoric.

Psycho-Sexual Manifestation

Why snuff? Because death is deeply erotic. Sigmund Freud believed that Thanatos, the death drive, was just as powerful as Eros, the sexual drive. According to Freud, Eros and Thanatos struggle within us constantly.

For the postmodern sadist it is different. We believe that there is no struggle between sex and death, for they are one. The blinding white light of orgasm embraces the cool blackness of the end, like yin and yang. For the French, a woman's climax is her "little death." For us, her death is the ultimate climax.

We do not force this truth upon women. We are seducers, not rapists. And some women do not need to be shows the beauty of their death, for they know it already. Our dreams of snuff belong to them as much as to us. To be sure, not all of the women in our dreams are willing victims--but it is not for these women that we dream.

We do not rush the climax. Pain is our foreplay, and we inscribe it upon women's bodies under the banner of our single prescription: make it last. In this our world is different from that of J. G. Ballard, who correctly understands the erotic nature of death--the blood, the semen, the crushed glass of the car crash--but who sacrifices screams for the quick pleasure of a Mansfieldian decapitation.

Aesthetic Manifestation

Our discourse began, of course, with Sade, who loved us so much that he gave us his most precious possession: his name. Since then, we have danced many dances and worn many masks. A single truth unites us, and it is the only truth that we do not transgress. It is the truth that pain is beautiful. We understand that suffering makes a woman radiant, whether it is the agony of childbirth or a slow stretching on the rack.

Today our aesthetic bears a single name: Dolcett.

Anti-Moral Manifestation

Here our only guide is Nietzsche. The postmodern sadist knows that God is dead, and that everything is permitted. We understand that all Judeo-Christian morality is bankrupt, for it is nothing but the cadaver of an ancient slave revolt. It has no hold on us. We are beyond good and evil, but this does not mean that we have no ethics. Indeed, our ethical project is older than the Christian project which it deliberately and consistently subverts. Our project is what Foucault calls "the care of the self." If our ethical system had a categorical imperative (ridiculous notion!), it would simply be this: "act always so that your life becomes a magnificent work of art." Like Nietzsche, we understand that our ethics and our aesthetics are therefore one and the same--which is to say that like Nietzsche, we take our ethics quite seriously. We follow the Nietzschean imperative: affirm life! And yet we also understand, as Bataille has shown us, that "eroticism is assenting to life even in death" (Eroticism, 11). Bataille's paradox lies at the heart of postmodern sadism. It is what keeps our language spiraling rather than solid, tenuous rather than totalitarian. It is what keeps our bodies and our discourse free.

As Marx was grateful for capital, we are grateful for the Puritan repression which has given us something to fight against. But of course, we also represent the end of such repression. We will not be closeted, cloistered or corsetted.

"Sade's system...is only the most consistent, and most costly, form of erotic activity. Moral isolation signifies the removal of constraints and, moreover, it alone manifests the deep meaning of expenditure. Anyone who believes in the worth of others is necessarily limited; he is restricted by this respect for others...the fact is that solidarity keeps man from occupying that place that is indicated by the word 'sovereignty.' (Bataille, Accursed Share, volume 2, 178)." Capital's greatest lie is scarcity, the outrageous claim that we must use market forces to determine the most efficient distribution of limited resources. In fact, as Bataille has shown, scarcity is an invention of capital. Behind the mask of ideology lies the smiling face of abundance and excess. Our world--the erotic world--is not about economic acculation. It's about frivilous expenditure, the unbridled consumption of resources, unnecessary destruction and death. It is for this reason that we dream of a world in which a woman can be casually hanged to death if it provides twenty minutes of pleasure for herself or for her lover. The most valuable resources in any economy are surely the reproductive resources, those that ensure the continued survival of the system. By dreaming the agonized demise of a woman barely old enough to conceive a child, we renounce the law of value and all utilitarian economics. We remove the wombs, the breasts, the milk, from the circuit of exchange. When we snuff a young mother or a pregnant woman, we snuff the entire semiotic order that sanctifies capital. With Bataille, we understand that sadism "is nothing more nor less than the logical consequence of these moments that deny reason. By definition, excess stands outside reason. Reason is bound up with work and the purposeful activity that incarnates its laws. But pleasure mocks at toil" (Eroticism, 168). Rationality offers us a world of parking lots and video surveillance cameras, fixed-rate mortgages and fusion bombs. We reply with an anarchy of desire. The rational man works, accumulates, consumes, obeys the law. At this the postmodern sadist laughs. It is a Nietzschean laughter, pure and potent, excessive, Dionysian. Political economy crumbles before such laughter. The system tries to fight back, of course: "The elimination of death is our phantasm, and ramifies in every direction: for religion, the afterlife and immortality; for science, truth; and for economics, productivity and accumulation (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 147)". But it cannot succeed, for death is always its inescapable Other: "If political economy is indeed Nirvana (the infinite accumulation and reproduction of dead value), then the death drive denounces its truth, at the same time as subjecting it to absolute derision (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 154)". Death has this power because, as Sade and Nietzsche both knew, we are and must remain morally alone.

Only by reducing all others to the status of pure object can we attain perfect sovereignty: as Foucault notes, "in Sade, sex is without any norm or intrinsic rule that might be formulated from its own nature; but it is subject to the unrestricted law of a power which itself knows no other law but its own; if by chance it is at times forced to accept the order of progressions carefully disciplined into succesive days, this exercise carries it to a point where it is no longer anything but a unique and naked sovereignty: an unlimited right of all-powerful monstrosity" (History of Sexuality, Volume One, 149). There is, however, much more to it than that. As Foucault himself points out, the sadistic relation is always reversable. (This is why S&M; is always different from social power; see Foucault, Essential Works, Volume One, 169) True, Sade always pretended at a sovereign subjectivity, which is why his sadism remains merely modern. Ours is different. Bataille says it best, sounding almost like a Zen monk: "at the very peak of unlimited denial of others is a denial of oneself" (Eroticism, 174). The postmodern sadist understands that all others are pure object and so are we, that both sadist and victim are simply nodes in the network, and neither of them is cursed with sovereign subjectivity. Rather, it is "desire that remains sovereign...the victim never being anything more than the remote, enigmatic, and narrative unity of an object of desire and a subject of suffering" (Foucault, Essential Works, Volume Two, 64).

Foucault is right to point out that what is essential in Sade (as in Nietzsche) is the recognition of the sovereignty of narrative, discourse, language, desire--far more powerful than the sovereignty of any mere Cartesian subject. Cybernetics projects this fundamental revelation into the postmodern age. Now the hypertextual narratives of sadist and victim intertwine, forming a discourse which is fractal, dispersed, multiple and without any center. This cybernetic multinarrative--so different from Lyotard's suspect metanarrative--is a nomadic discourse. It is entirely Other. "The first rending to expose the thought of the outside was, paradoxically, the recursive monologue of the Marquis de Sade. In the age of Kant and Hegel, at a time when the interiorization of the law of history and the world was being imperiously demanded by Western consciousness as never before, Sade never ceases speaking of the nakedness of desire as the lawless law of the world" (Foucault, Essential Works Volume Two, 150). Everyone knows that the final dialectical destination of universal Spirit is not the Kantian dream of perpetual peace but rather the atom bomb, not the Marxist dream of an end to alienation but rather Stalinism, not the Habermasian dream of communicative rationality but rather the mystification of the commodity. What Foucault calls the "thought of the outside"--and sadism is simply one of its more explosive manifestations--cannot fall prey to the totalitarian temptations of a dialectical thought, a scientific thought, a thought that continues to do the bidding of the empire of reason. The fact that Sade's narrative is recursive is, of course, essential. It is this recursion which keeps the narrative open and unfinished. This recursion, which required genius in Sade's age, is automatic now. Our machines recurse for us. They thus enable us to glimpse, for the first time and still only in barest outline, the structure of our liberation. This liberation begins with a liberation from agency: "it is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim--through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality--to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibilities of resistance" (Foucault, History of Sexuality, volume one, 157). Thus the postmodern sadist abandons the doomed and politically suspect project of liberating some desiring human subject from the strictures of repression. Liberation is possible--but let us begin by liberating ourselves from this cumbersome and increasingly irrelevent humanism.

Transpolitical/Micropolitical

For Foucault, power is omnipresent in modern society; its most insidious manifestation is bio-power, those forms of power which are exercised over our bodies. The modern world tries to assert its power over us in a million ways, and we refuse these assertions categorically. We resist bio-power by transgressing all sexual norms. Disciplinary power demands conformity, uniformity, normality. We respond with the obscene, the bizarre, the grotesque--what Baudrillard calls the "transpolitical." We respond also, of course, with death, for "death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it" (Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume One, 138). This is essential, for "normal" sexuality, if such a thing can even be said to exist any more, does not contain the transgressive possibilities which are to be found in a discourse of eroticized death. Baudrillard points out that "speaking of death makes us laugh in a strained and obscene manner. Speaking of sex no longer provokes the same reaction: sex is legal, only death is pornographic" (Symbolic Exchange and Death, 184). Again, it is laughter that we seek--the obscene and terrifying laughter of a Dionysian festival pushed to its radical limits. This laughter can be achieved only through the writing of a pornography of death. Such writing should not be considered "erotic literature." It is not so civilized! Its disturbing, destabilizing strength comes from the fact that it is dark, demented, even disgusting.

The postmodern sadist does not shoot the president, blow up Microsoft or seize control of AM/PM Mini-Marts--not because these things shouldn't be done, but simply because we understand that such macropolitical actions are no serious challenge to power in its contemporary configuration. We all know what the dialectic buys you: the Cultural Revolution, or a one-way ticket to the gulag. The various "options" which might be employed to reform the system of political economy in a bourgeois-liberal way do not merit discussion. What does that leave? Plenty. "Just as the network of power relations ends by forming a dense web that passes through appratuses and institutions, without being exactly localized in them, so too the swarm of points of resistance traverses social stratifications and individual unities. And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible" (Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume One, 96). We have yet to really attempt the politics of the small. We have yet to see what might happen when a concerted, organized effort is made to carve out and hold a discursive space so compact, so tiny, so deadly, that it can be known by a signifier such as "alt.sex.snuff.cannibalism." How can the phallogocentric semiotic order possibly respond to such a mobile, microscopic discourse? Only with its own death.

Snuffing the Real

Postmodern sadism is not real, and herein lies its beauty. No women were harmed in the making of these pages. We are free to indulge our deepest, most profane desires, secure in the knowledge that we are entirely beyond the real. To torture a woman to death would be barbaric and banal. The postmodern sadist tortures words to death, abuses ideas until they scream for mercy, punishes concepts and assumptions with gleeful abandon.

This is possible because, as Bataille points out, an expression of violence in the mode of Sade "changes violence into something else, something necessarily its opposite: into a reflecting and rationalised will to violence" (Eroticism, 191). We strive to stare into the abyss without blinking. Our project is to become that being which can think the thought of violence. Like the eternal return, the will to violence is a thought so powerful that its reality is irrelevent. Simply thinking it is enough. Ours is therefore a theoretical terrorism, far more dangerous than any actual bomb-throwing. We learn very quickly that the most powerful transgression available to us is not violence, rape and murder, but rather the transgression of the real.

"Transgression and violence," writes Baudrillard, "are less serious because they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation" (Simulacra and Simulation, 20). Marx and Bakunin followed a nineteenth century option, one that hoped to challenge the criminally unequal distribution of real wealth and real political power which haunted their age. Today we need a different strategy, a fatal strategy. "We will fight obscenity with its own weapons. To the truer than true we will oppose the falser than false. We will not oppose the beautiful to the ugly, but will look for the uglier than ugly: the monstrous" (Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, 7). The only option that makes sense today is the perpetual unmasking of power. This unmasking is carried out through an explosion of simulation, which is already under way. "Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it" (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1). This is the key to postmodern sadism. (If you like, it is the PGP public key: that which enables our subversive simulations, that which permits the generation of our radically indecipherable codes). Do you hate the Marquis? Don't worry; he doesn't exist. With a single "rm" command, he can return to the void which spawned him. Do the worlds of which the Marquis writes disturb you? Don't worry; they aren't real. And yet they are not unreal either. Their transgressive force comes from the fact that they are hyperreal: more real than real. The postmodern sadist writes lies which tell the truth. These are the hypertruths of the accursed share. We speak of a world cursed with such excessive abundance that it can respond only by torturing to death all beautiful women between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Our hypertruths occupy a position of radical Otherness with respect to political economy; through them we think the thought of the outside, perhaps for the first time. The worlds of which we write must never be allowed to attain reality, for if they did, they would immediately be lost within the quotidian world of capital, commodity and the state, their revolutionary potential instantly foreclosed.

Living within the postmodern condition, we already instinctively understand the subversive value of simulation. Why buy a book when you can scan it? Why buy a CD when you can make a digital audio tape of it? Why subscribe to Playboy when you can subscribe to alt.binaries.pictures.centerfolds.playboy? We must simulate everything. Our simulacra must increase to infinity, in their number and in their order of complexity. It is this orgy of simulation--and never an orgy of violence--that will herald the end of power. Only when the circulation of simulacra has surpassed light speed will we understand at last that nothing is real, and that power therefore has absolutely no hold over us. A Dionysian festival of simulation, a vast orgy of hyperreal sadistic excess, will reveal many things: that capital is nothing more than a collection of ones and zeros locked in an ugly, pathetic basement of the Citicorp building! That the state is nothing more than the sum total of sound bites concerning the distinguishing features of Bill Clinton's cock! That Cindy Crawford is nothing more than a collection of cosmetics, airbrushed and digitally retouched until she no longer exists! After all, "the acceleration of the simple play of signifiers in fashion becomes striking, to the point of enchanting us--the enchantment and vertigo of the loss of every system of reference. In this sense, it is the completed form of political economy, the cycle wherein the linearity of the commodity comes to be abolished" (Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 87). Cindy Crawford is the commodity that eats itself. Her signifiers burn too brightly, and with too little meaning; they cannot burn forever.

Ideally, then, the speech of the postmodern sadist is pure simulation: divorced from all reality, it short-circuits morality, repression and tyranny, all of which thrive within the real. The postmodern sadist flourishes in the hypperreal world of cyberspace. We fit very well into the subversive cyborg society imagined by Donna Haraway, who dreams of "a political form that actually manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state" (Manifesto for Cyborgs, 196). Part flesh, part silicon (breasts/chips), we are greater than the sum of our parts. We are a new life form for a new millenium. Dispersed across the electronic realm, we are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. And this is our strength.