M/S, or Making the Scene:
An Erotics of Space

by Thomas A. King

Contents

Fetishistic visions
Playspace
The sexed body
A culture of masochism
Making the scene
References

Harness, chaps, boots: fetish, a frisson that is not mine but in which I masquerade.¹ At the place where alterities face each other, on the boundary which faces both directions and is owned by neither, the fetish attaches itself. Positions: the fetish mounts me, the skin looks outside in and inside out, the nerves tingle over there. Hood, glove, clamps: the traces of relations--tangents, contiguities--into which I enter (and which my entry revises). Pleasures: the motions of interspaces operated by whomever is crossing, whomever is occupying, whomever is enunciating the space of encounter.²

The eyes of the leather boy are black and bottomless and they take me inside. The longing his eyes show is not his, it belongs somewhere else; I do not know where I will go when the bottom takes me into his eyes i blindfold him i make him look down. What new space appears between my lashes.

I put on the boots, the chaps; i am playing out another man's desire. The cockring pushing out your balls; you are the image of another man's desire. The gauntlets and motorcycle cap; we are reenacting another man's desire, one neither of us can own (although we smell and taste like it). The fetish is not ours; we fit ourselves to it.

Toys: public sex, but reconstituted "at home," by myself or with you. Playing with our toys we make ourselves visible, but within a field of vision to which we cannot be equivalent. Who is (watching us) having sex? He says: "Do we need to be top or bottom when it's just us?" I will make you see yourself as you are seen by another man (not-me).

Fetishistic visions

Peggy Phelan summarizes the reciprocity of the gaze: "one always locates one's own image in an image of the other and, one always locates the other in one's own image. . . . The desire to see is a manifestation of the desire to be seen. . . ."³ Where sex has been about privacy, this exchange of spaces (not a loss but a multiplication) has been overwritten by an ideal of visual reciprocity, a mutuality of looks that has become itself the (sentimental) face of privacy. But in the fetishistic exchange we cannot be coeval to our looking, nor are we lacking vis-a-vis the look; for the fetish is the nonsentimentalized face of the gaze. This is not to anthropomorphize the gaze as belonging to an identifiable other, to any one person or group of persons who sees: a king, law, or phallus that makes me appear on this page, a fantasy top that reads me. I am not called into being through my difference from the look. Nor is it to equate the gaze with an indeterminable or "radical other": womb, mother, death, a nowhere prior to or outside (this, your) writing, the blackness of the dungeon. The gaze is not the place of my self loss. Rather the gaze belongs to collective and accountable arrangements of space. The gaze is a material and historical technique--a spatializing--put into play by agents. We do not make each other w/hole but make each other the scene on which the practices particular to this place are enacted.⁴

As supplement (a space of deferral from my body to that of another man) the fetish makes my body appear, but always in the field of the other man. The fetish makes his body appear to me and engages me in a performance which does not belong to me. But to say that this performance does not belong to me is not to signal my lack, nor the shattering of my subjectivity, nor the death of my ego. That this performance (the fetish) does not belong to either of us is the condition of our mutual relatedness to another other, the bricolage through which we extend performance space.

At J's Hangout in New York, he sits on a ledge off to one side, his pants around his ankles, immobilizing his legs and framing his public nakedness. His erection lays against his abdomen; a dozen stainless steel rings extend his ballsack virtuosically. The spectacle touches me; I touch back. This (re)formulation of flesh through metal, at once a marking and yet mobile and musical like a dozen bracelets on a diva's wrist, commands my look. I accept and approve the supplement through which he makes himself visible to me; through his body he appears as difference from his body. The supplement (re)writes embodiment as a practice. His rendering of flesh into fetish--a totemic miming of a technology exceeding each other's look--he offers to the dozen or so clothed men cruising the bar. His is practiced flesh, a spectacle of discipline, endurance, and ostension.⁵ It requires something of my look and commands my hand. I am the top for him; he is the bottom for me. This spectacle of duration places us together in the present of our performance.

This is the agency of the fetish: it elicits an entrance into a space where an unnumbered number of men have already been. For these rings that look at me and command tactility are the material history and the shape of his encounters with other men; and as such these rings are the mimetic vehicle of a difference from "the body" that we men mime but which will never belong to us, except as the marks of endurance that it leaves on our bodies. Our mime brings us nothing outside of our relation in this place, and even here it buys only an appreciative glance, an evaluative touch, a drink perhaps. Fetish sex (leather sex, edge sex) makes nothing but the space of its next performance.⁶ Once a ritual object enabling agency--a repetition of the skins confronting each other at the boundary--the fetish has become the sign of its own impossibility under (psycho)analysis. As the disavowal of my knowledge of the other's difference, the fetish now marks my nonknowledge of my own self-difference. Individual desire (conversely, subjective lack) invents itself where collective mimetic activity has been disallowed. But the ring re-marks the penis (scrotum, nipple, or perineum) as the space of a mimetic activity, makes visible the practiced and citational terrain of pleasure. It thereby derails the unmarked mimesis, the disavowed performativity, through which the penis has passed, uninterrogated, as the phallus. As praxis rather than recollection, performance rather than autobiography, the ring puts into play Michel Foucault's famous query: what bodies, what pleasures will be the end of desire?⁷

Playspace

In the basement of the Hellfire clubhouse in Chicago,the bottom stands attentively behind the top. The top is seated across from us and he is at ease. We drink beer and chat; we only chat with the top. We address the bottom indirectly through his top, sustaining the couple's mutual construction of the field of vision and publicizing our own competence. Thereby we make the top; we make the bottom. In the normative public sphere this couple might go unremarked; their performance might disappear or, rather, pass as another performance ("invisibility," "fraternity," "hierarchy"). The presence of a willing and knowing audience makes their relationship visible to the group and to themselves. A performed relation must re-mark its rules and techniques, ostending the expected competencies, if it is to hold the stage and make space for further repetitions.

(My) identity is therefore a practice of agents (more than two) redeploying body and other spaces across time to secure the continuity of the performance space. An I (my eye) does not map its consciousness across all spaces as the mechanism of its priority to these spaces; nor does (my) self develop organically as it moves through and across various social spaces.⁸ Rather (my) self is a relatedness, not necessarily continuous, to the possible paradigms for performance that have taken shape and been localized in various collective spaces--paradigms that precede my entry into or re-use of those spaces. A "trajectory" rather than a property or a disclosure,⁹ identity is a temporally and spatially discontinuous practice.

I wear for other gay men my sexuality on my sleeve; I dress to the left. T-shirts, bandanas, keychains, haircuts: signs, not of shared desires, but of my share in the publicizing, witnessing, and theatricalizing of pleasure-spaces, the giving and making of (inter)faces. Watching gay porn I watch another looking at this simulation of interspaces, my spectatorship reproducing the alignment of looks by which we witness our entrance into the performance space. I see myself as a gay man because I look as other gay men look, appear as other gay men appear. This is the premise of the "clone" look and the gym body; it is the apparatus of cruising, "gaydar" or "the gay regard" (to borrow a phrase from the late Martin Worman). Giving face, we recreate the performance space; we circulate collective techniques toward the realizing of the scene itself; our identity is not our sameness to each other, but to the temporary and shifting spaces we occupy. The primary playspace is the collective body.

This priority of the collective over the individual is the key to gay men's irony. Gay men's raillery theatricalizes the demand to make sexual positions and roles speak, relocating pleasures at a collective level that have been overdetermined at the individual (psychological) level. Gay men's irony refuses any simple recourse to a teleology of masculinity for the legitimacy of their pleasures; pace Leo Bersani, raillery directed at the butch queen with his legs in the air does not make him less desirable but more mundane, neither more nor less than a man but more competent as a gay performer (208). Nor is this a matter of "gay men's misogyny" or their "ambivalence toward women." This raillery degrades any attempt to pass as a "real man"; to be "straight-acting" is to fail to be "butch," a gay hybrid not a self-possession. Gay raillery makes the failure to pass the passport to collective affiliation.

Sex with friends: taboo in a privatized society. But in an expanded sense, always occurring: the baths, the sauna at the gym, the notorious tree in the Fens in Boston, the college tearoom, the jack-off club, and the after-hours party, but also the brush of bodies on the disco floor, the tactile gaze, and the admiring tweak of a nipple during a workout. Indeed it may be that the construction of spaces for sex among friends is what most distinguishes "gay" from "straight society." (I use these terms to mark, not essential identities, but "framed" spatial domains which may be, and are occupied by men-who-have-sex-with-men and/or men-who-have-sex-with-women.) Gay men give each other dildos for gifts, but only in group settings. The public traffic in dildos, this gift exchange of rubber, is the collective and totemic affirmation that "gay identity" is the ostension of a space that does not belong to any one man: the rectum, an open surface or stage on which a collective praxis is realized, and not the absolute interiority imagined by Bersani, wherein the ethical ideal of intersubjectivity is shattered.

Given the persistence (indeed expansion) of these practices during the ongoing AIDS crisis, we might think that "gay subculture" consists in the institutional reversal of Freud's "finding" that social feeling is a sublimation of homosexual attitudes towards objects. Guy Hocquenghem added, "It would be interesting to try and describe what ‘social' relations not based on homosexual sublimation might be like, or, alternatively, to envisage what effects the desublimation of homosexuality would have on social organisation" (110). For Freud, social bonds and obligations were a reorientation of (primary and typically male) homosexual desire toward a less narcissistic, more altruistic relation with "the other" (always defined as "woman"). Identity in the Freudian scenario, far from being innate, is an effect of this reorientation vis-a-vis "the other," leading Hocquenghem to posit that desublimated homosexuality "creates the risk of a loss of identity" (101).¹⁰ It may be more helpful to posit that sex among men (always more than two)--as among women or between men and women--constitutes space (the continuity of performance in the privatized home or the publicized park) rather than subjectivity (the presence, absence, or shattering of self-continuity), or, better, subjectivity only as the contingent practice of space. Rather than marking out a line of differentiation or a point of resemblance between the private and the civic, as coupled sex is meant to do, sex among friends constitutes only a temporary and local form of social organization. The continuity of any such organization (the continuity of pleasure) is ensured by the preservation of the collective space; but the space itself has an open and provisional form enabling improvisation and revision. The continuity of public sex space does not require any likeness between the individual's desire and the form of that space (as does the heterosexual family, which must reproduce itself at the level of individual desire through Oedipalization).

The baths, the bushes, the dunes, the tearooms, the sex clubs all operate along a fundamental principle of visibility--but this visibility is a praxis of ostension. A man, any man "belongs" there whenever he offers himself to the gaze of the space. (Gay) men's public sex spaces, making visible rules and techniques rather than fixed and integrated identities, have located a deflection of identity at the center of identity politics itself. The dildo can be given to any man. Playspaces demonstrate that gay and straight identities mutually constitute each other through the public disavowal of other possible uses of bodies. Accordingly the playspace proliferates the fetish, the practice of the space at which the border is to be relocated. Around the fetish (which belongs to no individual but has a history of uses) a metonymy of bodies occurs; this syncopation of bodies in space does not express or produce a private self. The fetish is a space facing both ways (it can be entered from the front or the back); a border, its "identity" is constituted by whomever is crossing it at the moment. The fetish is that collective praxis by which we designate the space of our performance.

The sexed body

The Freudian body--one such space--is mapped as a collection through which its pleasures become knowable and purposeful as desire. It is zoned toward the localization of libidinal energy and the production of maximum sexual efficiency; its gestures are calculated to reveal, retrospectively, the unity of the sexed body and its investment in the other. We are thereby invested in desiring bodies through our pleasures.¹¹ The libidinal territorialization of the body, Kaja Silverman has summarized, focusses on those regions of the body which open to the world, most importantly the mouth, anus, penis, and vagina (Subject 145, 155). Noticeable in this account is the absence, among the other sensory organs, of the eyes and the hands. Eyes have changed, from orifices open to the world to faculties by which the world becomes objectively known and subjectively desired.¹² Eyes have acquired the competency of hands, which have learned to grasp and manipulate their objects from a distance; we no longer say that the object summons the eye/hand. The "masculine" erotics of the gaze follows from an ostensible power of hands to distinguish self and other; Freud's comment that seeing is "an activity that is ultimately derived from touching" reminds us that the field of vision is a historical and material technology reinstated through embodied practices (22). But does the space of a touch, the ripple in the nerves, "belong" to me or to the object pressing against my fingertips?

A critical performance might reconstitute bodyspace as nonobjective, as a performance practice rather than the container or remainder of performance. To say, following Michel de Certeau, that (body/play)space is "practiced place" is to remark the agent rather than the subject (117). Rationalism, objectivism, and ocularcentrism, by contrast, impose distance between men and their bodies. A man can say, I touch myself; but to say "I touch myself" is to erase some thing--not the phallus, but the hand. For the hand, rationalism substitutes the I/eye; I see my body caressing itself, "the" hand on "the" cock, as a production, a manipulation, a technology. My hand is no longer my body, but its interlocutor; disembodied, it is an extension of the I/eye. This displacement of the hand, from body to symbolization, assures that even men's solitary pleasures phallocize them and tie them to capitalization. Luce Irigaray discovered the difference of women through an indifference to this lie about male bodies: "[W]oman's autoeroticism is very different from man's. He needs an instrument in order to touch himself: his hand, woman's genitals, language--And this self-stimulation requires a minimum of activity. But a woman touches herself by and within herself directly, without mediation, and before any distinction between activity and passivity is possible" (100). Only an ideological fiction--"masculinity"-- keeps my eye/I and my hand apart, a subject and his tool: hand, language, object. But what is "masculinity" if not this very fiction of the priority and externality of the self to language? "I" cannot touch "myself" but in language, because language constitutes its subject and its object. Autobiography opens a performance space: in stroking the keyboard, I take it into my body; "I" becomes the signifier, the trace, the record of an event of pleasure (keys stroking my fingertips), and is transformed even now in this new performance of reading (black type touching your eyes, white paper between your forefinger and thumb).¹³ Embodiment: the great Enlightenment drive to proliferate sensual experience through the text and in the marketplace. "You" and "I" summoned by the texts that circulate between and mediate us and that articulate the exchange of our pleasures. If we revise the narrative of the male body, we respatialize it as well; it is occupied by someone else crossing it otherwise on a trail of words and gestures. This is not to say it is "lost" but only practiced.

Fetish play, sex play, edge sex: these disturb the efficiency and utility of bodily orientations, skewing the mapping of body parts as purposeful, unified, and an adequate image of my "self." A kind of Brownian motion introduced into the performed field of sexuality, such play may involve spatial reorientations and unruly kinetic exchanges at the collective level. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, I meet a group of men the night of the full moon to share "erotic, full-body massages." Each man will welcome and embrace all the others; moving in snakelike patterns we are disallowed from offering our fronts or our backs to any one man. We move neither forward nor backward; in random encounters we are blindfolded and undressed by anonymous hands; I cannot be top or bottom here (this is hard for me). Who is the other here to offer the image of my arousal to me? at whom do I aim an image of my desirability? The other here is not any one man, nor is it an anonymous discourse. The other is the group which already includes me; the other is the technique given me by the group that includes me. If the self is an effect of a discourse that has already addressed me, my agency is a matter of the way I propel myself through the place of that address into the space of another discourse. Performance space is always available to the performance collective. We begin to reorganize our breathing: in, in, in, out; through the mouth; in, in, in, out. In the men's hut "the male body" acquires a new practice, the practice a new body.

Male sexual "response" is a learned, in-body technique calculated for physical and psychic efficiency. Tensing my perineum and asshole, I cut off my pleasure at the moment of ejaculation, propelling semen out of my body with the greatest possible efficacy [the end-(of-)pleasure]. This "response" that I experience as a loss of control, this little death, is a well-trodden path. I have been here before; I know this story by heart; I can do it in my sleep. My ejaculation, pace Bersani, is not a self-shattering but a canonical text in which I inscribe my pleasure as man into the order of desire. We always see ourselves coming. Precisely because it is "out of my control," my sexual "response" must be witnessed and defended by other men; my lack of mastery at the individual level (my vulnerable and self-spending dick) is the basis of my mastery at the collective level (my illusive hold on the phallus).

I give a couple of fingers to the ass of my friend. He jerks my fingers exploring inside him; I press the palm of my hand against his perineum. Unable to tense the muscles of his cock and perineum, his pleasure cannot so easily "end"; his ejaculation will be delayed and unlocalized.

Sex as restored behavior has among its thrills improvisation, endurance, and the reconstitution of the playspace. Its "end" is not a product but another encounter; it cannot "end," therefore, in the shattering of the psychic subject, a shattering conceived psychoanalytically as productivity, as an economizing on expenditure. Performed sex constitutes not the loss but the extension of bodyspace in and across bodyspace. Considering Freud's notion of the pleasure principle, Silverman notes "the shortcoming of any theoretical account of pleasure that stresses constancy over rupture and coherence over ‘shattering'" (Male Subjectivity 208). But the performance practice of self will be discontinuous as the agent moves across and re-uses (body)spaces in time. Only if we hold that agents should be primarily interested in ontological stability can we equate pleasure with either coherence or rupture. Iteration does not fully constitute (hail) subjectivities, nor does the failure to iterate open up a gap in identity (cf. Butler, "Imitation" 18); iteration hails performance space. The continuity of performance space does not require the continuity of identity (it is for this reason that we should protect "public" cruising grounds and tearooms). In these contested spaces, agents' performances reconstitute or revise the terms of previous performances (Drewal 95-97).

Bersani has described all sexuality as "masochistic" and "self-shattering" (217). But one can only equate masochism and loss if one holds that the self is stable, coherent, and unified in its mundane activity (thus locating sexuality as extraordinary activity and loading it with excess significance). Only if we privilege the atomic ego above the field of kinetic relations can we say that any real thing has been dissolved. Bersani's formula maintains, moreover, the modern European construction of sex as practices of the body distinct from, and more problematic than, all other practices of the body (see Rubin 11). But if by "ego" we understand a projection of the surfaces of our body to ourselves and others, then ego is not properly a thing but a mimetic activity--what Erving Goffman calls a "display," events indicating "the actor's alignment in a gathering, the position he [sic] seems prepared to take up in what is about to happen in the social situation" (Gender 1). The ego is creative, and it cannot belong to atomic subjects since it is the projection of an interspace. What is shattered belongs to no one; it is simply an abandoned trajectory in the field of relations.¹⁴

Ontological security does not depend on the stability of the ego, unless we understand the latter (as Goffman seems to do) as an effect of our competence as agents to maintain stable, interactive performances with others (Presentation 232, 239, 254). But we need not accept Goffman's insistence on an innate desire for stability (revealing a number of gender and ethnocentric biases). The multiple maps of space and time constituting the liminal or interspace provide opportunities for extending (not dissolving) the self. Thus the masochist may report feeling more "centered" (an appropriately spatial metaphor for the muscular sense of oneness with the performance space) as a result of activities disrupting both inwardness and a stable mapping of the body's placement in space and time.

The ego cannot be dissolved in a performance (for example, a sex act). What is the ego but the ostension of "my" body and therefore the (inter)face I present at the boundary where I grasp (become) the other? It is a copy of "me" as I project "myself' into the field of relations between "myself" and "others." Through that projection I become "I" (the visual mark on a space, a page, a screen) as I enter a performance field which is both external to me and produced by me; this ego-copy ("I") is thus a "mimesis of mimesis" (Taussig 79). The ego is "not me," but as Richard Schechner wisely said of the actor, it is also "not not me" (110-12). To say that the subject is "founded on loss," by contrast, is to make performance space external to the agent whose practices in fact produce that space. Nothing is lost; performance space is always being remade.

I am unaware of the duration: three hours that evening in Cambridge without ejaculation has induced a near trance state. All the surfaces of my body have served as both receptive and propelling agents. The space between my shoulder blades has received hands, forearms, and knees; but my shoulders have also massaged chests, thighs, and asses. This multiplicity has dispersed my usual orientations of front-back, up-down, and in-out across the field of possible encounters. At the same time, the randomness of our movements has disrupted my sense of being situated in the room along the axes of time and space; and the effect has been enhanced by wearing a blindfold or simply keeping my eyes shut. I become more familiar with the new technique of breathing just before my host instructs me to hold my breath and clench all the muscles of my body. I feel lightheaded and see white light; I realize I have been laying on a massage table for now I float above it.¹⁵

A collective practice, an ars erotica bestowed by a master and constituting an erotic calculus: energy, repetition, duration, and an acceleration that feeds itself without expenditure. This is a perpetual motion of pleasure, a performed pleasure that does not separate from itself through ejaculation but relocates the body at the next, more intensive performance level.

A culture of masochism

Back in a graduate seminar I asked participants to read Mark Johnson's The Body in the Mind. Johnson proposes that meaning is embodied because innate and universal "image-schemata" corresponding to the regionalization and physical limitations of the body (up-down, front-back, in-out, containment-propulsion) are extended experientially across the field of meanings through metaphor and metonymy (48, 98-104). The members of the seminar rightly criticized Johnson's assumption of a pre-linguistic but schematized body; Johnson's innate image-schemata are constituted only retrospectively through language. Where a universal is posited, performance skill is ignored. One might add, moreover, that the orientations underwriting, for Johnson, the innate authority of the body reconstitute heteronormativity through the regionalization, orientation, and purposefulness of our bodies against the body of the other.

It may take at least three men to construct one post-heterosexual male subject.

Fetish play involving pain/pleasure has a similar modality. Pain in our mundane experience--as punishment, humiliation, and prohibition, as well as illness, disease, injury, and trauma--places the self, where "place" is understood, following Tuan, as pause in movement (6). Mundane pain constitutes the libidinal zoning of the infant's body, through corporeal punishment or such practices as male and female circumcision, but chiefly through the prohibition of legitimacy for other uses of the body. (The libidinal body is an enunciative field that allows certain statements and disallows others.) This prohibition-production which territorializes the body and directs the trajectory of its pleasures initiates the subject into its melancholic economy of loss and desire, which is known and felt at specific points of the body as prohibitions on as well as productions of the uses of those parts (uses that only begin to be imagined in the distinction between bottom and top, reception and penetration, anus and phallus). This territorialization of the body gives the subject its phenomenological experience of its own realness.

S/M play typically proceeds by denigrating (which is not to say denying) the libidinal zoning of the body (cock, ball, or nipple "torture"; "humiliation" of the mouth, anus, or penis; plugging orifices), and extends that denigration from specific parts of the body to the orientation of the body as a whole; the partitioning of the body into front/back, up/down, or right/left is interrupted through technologies including mummification, desensitization, suspension, inversion, and immobilization. A scene may progress through pressure exerted on the surface of the skin (including flogging, pulling, pinching, pricking, clamping, and constricting) or radical constructions of the flesh (including vacuum pumping, saline injections, piercing, tattooing, and cutting). These procedures make a new trajectory of the surfaces of the body "visible" and experientially knowable for the players in the scene for the duration of the performance. They mark in the flesh, but temporarily (this is not a "product"), the player's difference from their bodies as they have experienced those bodies in an Oedipalized economy. The techniques of fetish play may short-circuit the field of visual knowledge: a lingering on tactility, on the ears (I can fill your ears with sound or deprive them of sound), the nose (you can be blindfolded and made to smell; I can offer the smell of my sweat, urine, or semen to you as a supplement); or the tastebuds (you can be made to lick my balls, my asshole, my armpit). Fetish play begins when what would otherwise be foreplay is made to "linger there," and either an equilibrium is not restored, or an act is not allowed to progress to its finish (the end-of-pleasure).

Sadomasochism is a set of practices in which the self's ability to map space as outside itself is suspended; the performer's occupation of spaces and techniques projects him as different from himself, that is, from what he would be in another space. (This is central to bondage narratives, for example, BostonCuir's online photo documentation of "a couple from Australia . . . in Boston for a few days as one of them had a seminar to attend locally before they headed off to Europe" or "a gentleman from Scotland [who was] coming to Boston to teach a summer class at a local, well-known university", all shown restrained in leather and rubber catsuits, straitjackets, and molded hoods.) The masochist ostends a bodyspace and a technique that does not belong to and precedes him. The sadist is not the masochist's binary other; unlike masculinity and femininity within heterosexism, sadism and masochism are contiguous, rather than complementary or compensatory. Sadism and masochism are kinetic trajectories wrapped around a shared boundary. The two terms are jointly creative: masochism is the introduction of the sadist into the spatial field of relations, and sadism is the introduction of the masochist into the spatial field of relations. This mutual writing cannot exist outside the field of the writing; the field of writing cannot exist outside the relations of its enactment.

Anthony Giddens concludes his discussion of Foucault by asserting that "Foucault's ‘bodies' are not agents" (154) and "do not have faces" (where "face" is the interface between performers, the mark of their reciprocity). But my face is now somewhere else; it is not the sign of my presence but the space of my agency. Agency, thought Certeau, is a means of situating one's practices in the field of another other, moving one's words into another discursive network. I make a pleasure that always belongs to another, specifically, to another's use of the supplement --the face--through which I make my body visible to him. In this sense, my pleasure is masochistic; it is the displacement of the atomic psychic subject by the collective space.

Making the scene

What makes the text you are reading a fetish is not just the cultural capital it signifies but its offer of a co-presence centered around the physiological sensations of reading and the exchange and interpretation of speech. Put into practice, the text becomes a space in which we both become present, to ourselves and to each other. You are reading "alone," but the meaning you invest in the text is its trace of "our" oral and kinesthetic co-presence. You make the scene of our encounter. It is as if we perfectly understand each other. The text is a mimetic medium for creating "our" co-presence out of paper and ink, or pixels and light. When you hold a text that has been held by others, you feel you are holding their hands and thinking their thoughts. What happens, then, when a new technology for opening space, for (re)turning texts into spaces--the Internet--locates erotic pleasure, not between two men, but collectively among a performance community whose constituents cannot be known or predicted? In asynchronous sex--exhibitionism or voyeurism on the Internet, for example, or nonsimultaneous e-mail sex¹⁶--I have no control over how the supplement I produce to imagine myself and project my self-image will be used by others, for I am not there. Indeed, the technology of the computer itself remains radically other to my desire; and yet the inassimilable means, for instance, by which the image (my supplement, my face) downloads on another's screen can be in itself a pleasure, a dispersal and therefore refusal of the reciprocity of the gaze. Signing on or signing off is signing into a series of conjunctions over which I have no control. I cannot predict how thousands of men will occupy and use the same space as I: one man is jerking off on my face; an other is making a thick description of my supplement for a research paper; another other is investigating the necessity of censoring the trace of our interactions. There can be no fascist imposition of my ego on the space of asynchronicity.

As a technology, the Internet provides opportunities for intersystemicity: any one entry into computer space is a spatialization asynchronous in time and discontinuous in space with all other entries (by myself or others) into that space. The space of the Internet is not present as "a virtual dungeon" or "a virtual coffeehouse" or "a virtual bedroom" except when we try to impose presence on the apresence of the Internet. The Internet is a technology, then, for producing asynchronous interspaces and Brownian trajectories, for rethinking the public sphere in the absence of a mutual regard between abstracted male subjects.

I reload Toaph's erection (fort - da); but to whom does this plenitude belong? whose mastery does this repetition confirm? Through a series of personal essays and poems accompanying the bodies he performs, Toaph both locates his exhibitionism in a network of spaces and encounters offline and presents his online activity as an opportunity for radically altering those spaces. Toaph's essays create a trajectory of queered spaces, making those spaces available for reuse by others. Each account locates itself in a particular place: the grade school nurse's office, the YMCA swimming pool, the college dormitory showers, a figure drawing class, a game of strip poker played with his straight friends, the Psi Phi fraternity house. "Tales from the Locker Room," a set of essays that Toaph has apparently removed from his site, replayed his exhibitionism at Cornell University itself, at that time his place of employment. Toaph detailed the possibilities for exhibitionism/voyeurism and group sex in the athletic complex's locker and steam room, providing a diagram of the facilities. More than mere personal documentation or confession, Toaph's oral histories are meant to make future encounters possible in these spaces. If "amateur" porn, 24/7 webcams, and scans of exhibitionist "dares" are some of the hottest scenes on the internet, this global "perving" of public places, and republicizing of private places, enables the rest of us to enter those spaces differently, to use them differently, to multiply their meanings and refuse legitimacy to the fiction of a personal self that closes in public and opens in intimate spaces.

Often when we enter a cyberspace we are told the number of visitors who have already been there. (276931 visitors had occupied Toby's Exhibition & Bondage pages before my re-entrance on 12 October 2000.) This space has been well traversed; there are cum stains on the floor; the moving counter tells me others are still coming. Fetishistic texts operate on the supplements of others. These pleasures say little about my desire, indicating only my access to the performance space. Just as we can never finally control the images we post, so we can never fully elicit the images we see. We can only stop downloading (using, cruising, but never originating) one image and move on to another. One cannot see the other in order to see one's self, because the other online occupies neither the same space as I nor the present tense. For psychoanalysis, by contrast, both voyeurism and exhibitionism are partners in a specular relation, calculated toward self-reflection (however derailed along the way). For psychoanalysis, in other words, spectacularity--the vision that draws the eye outside itself--is devalued in relation to specularity. Fetishistic vision exceeds the specular relation and remakes the visual field rather than fixing my place within it.

Fetishistic vision articulates positions that cannot be referred back to anatomy and do not act retrospectively to confer knowledge on the genitals as phallic or castrated, potent or lacking. Fetishistic visions "jump the track" and make bodyspace excessive to sexual differentiation. Performing through a supplement it does not own, the bodyspace becomes present as an interspace in the field of kinetic relations among bodies. Michael Taussig ventriloquizes Roger Caillois, speaking of "‘presence' as an invented space of which the mime is the convulsive possession." I (the I-mime) am present as that space which another space (my act of mime) dispossesses (34). This supplement through which I become present--gesture, tone of voice, costume, body ornaments--dispossesses me, for to whom does the supplement belong but to another man? And it belongs not to this man for whom I display them (the top) but to another who is other to him as well. Where will I locate my bodily experience of this mime, this play, this dispossession? Not in my mind, and not in "my" body--unless by body we understand that space of sensuous contact with the mime that dispossesses me. I cannot see myself as this other (the top) sees me; but hooded, and through the supplement, I see our relation as the other other--this supplement beyond us--might see us both. I recite the inauthenticity of top and bottom, their tangential relation to who I am in another space, their externality enacted as my difference in time.

A psychoanalytic reading of these roles, positions, and techniques might hold that playing leads (only) to more playing because the subject, failing to internalize the symbolic field, remains in an immature, mimetic relation to its concrete manifestations (to daddy). But an insufficient analysis of performance underwrites this analysis, one that understands mimetic repetition as consoling the subject for its alienation in language. Instead bottom and top play out a procedure of spatialization; the phallus is revised as a playspace that is the scene of our agency and not the trigger of our desire. No one can have the phallus and be a desiring subject; but if the phallus is unavailable to individuals qua subjects, this is only a problem ("castration") when we prioritize the self to the field of relations (Goffman's ontological security). The phallus is a space which agents continually reopen through their practices, making the scene of their pleasures. To put this another way, the queering of heteronormativity occurs not just because of the unruliness of any one subject's progress through the Oedipal scenario. It occurs because desire and identification are played across larger kinetic bodies than that of the atomic subject. One can identify with the space of the interactions among bodies (for example, the playspace). Because this interspace is external to who I am in another space it will also be the scene of my desire.

I have been influenced throughout this essay by Sue-Ellen Case's now classic argument, in "Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic":

[T]he butch-femme couple inhabit the subject position together . . . . They are not split subjects, suffering the torments of dominant ideology. They are coupled ones who do not impale themselves on the poles of sexual difference or metaphysical values, but constantly seduce the sign system through flirtation and inconstancy into the light fondle of artifice, replacing the Lacanian slash with a lesbian bar. (56-57)

Case's argument in this important essay constituted an intervention in discussions of "the" subject (here, "the feminist subject"). Rather than conceptualizing subjects as atomic individuals, which invariably has the effect of reinscribing subjectivity within an organic psyche and a unified body, Case reconsidered subjectivity as a performative interaction. If, like Case's butch-femme couple, the performed interaction of top and bottom constitutes a single subject, there is always a third present--the other other of the space, the technique, and the public circulation of roles, positions, and information. This other other (the third man) exceeds the reciprocity of looks between self and other; this other other is the space of our agency. This third is the field of performance relations that is not me and not not me, that is both prior to and reconstituted in our practice. The top respatializes the body of the bottom and produces the bottom's visibility to the other other. The bottom sees himself through the image the top makes of him. The top's pleasure comes from his power to reorient the bottom's body, but also from seeing himself in the space of the bottom (in the regard of the other other). The top, too, is a place that the bottom spatializes. Both creatively degrade and transform the (fictional but coercive enterprise of the) Cartesian ego into a contestable and revisable space.

References

Barthes, Roland. A Lover's Discourse. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

---. The Pleasure of the Text [Le Plaisir du texte]. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang-Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975.

Bersani, Leo. "Is the Rectum a Grave?" October 43 (Winter 1987). Reprint. AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism. Ed. Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT-OCTOBER, 1988. 197-222.

Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. What it is, With all the kinds[,] causes, symptoms, prognosticks, & severall cures of it. 7th ed. London: Printed by H. Cripps, 1660.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Thinking Gender. New York: Routledge, 1990.

---. "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 13-31.

Case, Sue-Ellen. "Toward a Butch-Femme Aesthetic." Discourse 11.1 (Fall/Winter 1988-89): 55-73.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Drewal, Margaret Thompson. Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972.

---. The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduc-tion. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. and rev. ed. James Strachey. Intro. Steven Marcus. USA: Basic-HarperCollins, 1975.

Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Goffman, Erving. Gender Advertisements. 1976. New York: Harvard UP, 1979.

---. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, New York: Anchor-Doubleday, 1959.

Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.

Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. 1972. Trans. Daniella Dangoor. Preface Jeffrey Weeks. 1978. Reprint. Series Q. Intro. Michael Moon. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993.

Irigaray, Luce. "This Sex Which Is Not One." 1977. Reprint. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1980. 99-106.

Johnson, Mark. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1987.

King, Thomas A. "Gender and Modernity: Male Looks and the Performance of Public Pleasures." Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Writing the Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment. Ed. Mita Choudhury and Laura J. Rosenthal. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, forthcoming.

Lowe, Donald M. History of Bourgeois Perception. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.

Morrison, Paul. "End Pleasure." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1.1 (1993): 53-78.

Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975). Reprint. Feminism and Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988. 57-68.

Murray, D. W. "What is the Western Concept of the Self? On Forgetting David Hume." Ethos 21.1 (1993): 3-23.

Pavis, Patrice. Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre. New York: Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), 1982.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Rubin, Gayle S. "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. 3-44.

Schechner, Richard. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1985.

Silverman, Kaja. "Fragments of a Fashionable Discourse." Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture. Ed. Tania Modleski. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 139-152.

---. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.

---. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.

Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York and London: Routledge, 1993.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1977.

Turnbull, Colin. "Liminality: A Synthesis of Subjective and Objective Experience." By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual. Ed. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 50-81.