GEOPOLITICS OF THE ORGY

by Jaime del Val

thanks to Algorithmic Orgy for the translation from the Spanish version

Orgiastic Ontology

Following biologist Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, evolution is literally a continuous planetary orgy that has been going on for 4 billion years, primarily an orgy of bacteria and viruses. Bacterial sex is the mechanism of genetic exchange, and therefore of continuous mutation, that underlies the radical plasticity of bacteria, where each colony of bacteria is a diverse orgiastic amalgam, each amalgam is a different sex, a way of composing with others while mutating: no longer a thousand tiny sexes as Deleuze and Guattari would say, but a thousand quintillion sexes of the biosphere, an expression of the quantum fluctuations that unfold in every universe. Viruses are the quintessential mechanism of horizontal genetic transfer between bacteria, and therefore the main source of biodiversity, in the orgy of evolution where sex is only mutation, not reproduction. When a dominant species destabilizes the complex viral and bacterial ecosystems that gradually emerge in the evolutionary orgy, pandemics emerge, such as COVID-19 that now distances us socially.

Yet in the anomalous (but-dominant-because-reductive) culture of reproductive heterosexual monogamy, the orgy, which never disappears, must be hidden. Funnily enough, in the  orgy “uncovered” in Brussels last Friday, November 27, 2020, the only obvious illegality that led to the raid was breaking the social distance rules provisionally imposed by the pandemic. But in the geopolitical struggle of the Hungarian and Polish extreme right-governments within the EU, and in the media sensationalism, the historically conservative and monogamous morality is manifested, that makes orgies in general object of scandal. This proliferation reproduces the old scheme manifested by Foucault of the incitement to discourse, but with some differences.

Let us pause first, however, to analyze the complexity of aspects of the news about this particular orgy that has given it an unprecedented media and political significance. These days the word orgy has proliferated with unsusual exhuberance. But in the news multiple layers intersect that give it unusual complexity. Never in recent history has an orgy (gay or of any kind) had such repercussions and implications, yet to be accounted for. The word has proliferated with a viral potential (in the sense of viral media) never seen before. Let’s unravel them and see the paradoxes and multiple strata:

1. On the one hand there is the sensationalism, the sheer scandal of uncovering an orgy, a gay orgy, a gay orgy with drugs and only unprotected sex, an orgy that concerns a politician, an ultra-conservative politician, one precisely from a homophobic regime, a homophobic country in the EU and in full tension due to its homophobia within the EU; and all this in the midst of the social distance restrictions of the pandemic! … In terms of scandal and orgies it is difficult to imagine a convergence of more elements.
2. For part of the population it will have been a surprise to know that orgies are organized, not only rarely but also regularly, and by anyone through apps, not only in millionaires’ homes, dating apps make orgies available to anyone;
3. and more particularly gay orgies, with drugs and unprotected sex: chemsex comes out of the closet (later we will examine the complex phenomenon of chemsex in more depth),
4. and that this takes place in the heart of the EU and where high-level politicians regularly participate.
5. All of this has acquired a geopolitical dimension by affecting the strong man of the ultra regime of Hungary in its relationship with the EU, one of the architects of its homophobic constitution, precisely a politician who has contributed to articulate this institutional homophobia, married, in case we did not have enough, with a powerful ultra-conservative judge. A relevant and key politician in the articulation of the homophobic front of ultra Europe.
6. And this happens precisely at a time when there is unprecedented tension at European level because Hungary and Poland veto budgets, including billionaire aids for the pandemic crisis, precisely because the EU wants to put a limit on their homophobic and ultra-conservative policies;
7. moment in which, through the orgy, the ultra regime and its double moral, the total hypocrisy of homophobic legislators, are flagrantly exposed. The question that the ultra regime is asking is ¿how many József Szájer do we have inside and how many know about it? Which reminds us, for example, of the widespread homosexual practices among Nazi officers.
8. The multiple discredit that the event supposes for the Hungarian regime is not without a homophobic background in itself: it would certainly be less scandal if the politician had been caught in a heterosexual orgy.
9. Will this orgy shake the regime, weaken it, or strengthen it? What repressions and purges could come in Hungary and Poland? Does this weaken Hungary’s position in the EU? What real geopolitical dimension does this event have, taking into account the situation not only within the EU but also in relation to other conservative powers? This would be a first geopolitical dimension of this particular orgy.
10. Part of the media sensationalism is undoubtedly the outrageous and sudden fall of the character, József Szájer, worthy of the most ingenious movie script, with the apparently insurmountable sum of elements: violation of regulations of the pandemic, gay orgy with drugs and without a condom, and fleeing half-naked through a pipe in the cold, with bleeding hands. The character’s loneliness is total, as he is also attacked in his hypocrisy by the LGTTTBIQ + movements. Should we crucify him even more or make him the first modern martyr of anti-orgiastic morality, a Saint Patron of orgies to come? A plaque has already been placed on the pipe through which he wanted to escape, giving the event historical significance. Tour guides will surely visit it soon.
11. But one of the exquisite peculiarities of the news is that the only true legal or moral violation has been relative to the distancing measures from COVID. Although we know that the punishment that awaits him in Hungary is for everything else.
12. That the party organizer David Manzheley, is showing his face, defending the legality and freedom of making these parties, is equally unusual, a buttress of European freedoms that no politician has dared to affirm in the face of ultra conservatism. He has expressed his intention to denounce the police for the way they broke in with homophobic attitudes, and affirms that these parties are an oasis of freedom for politicians from repressive countries. Here is a second, more general geopolitical aspect of the orgy. It is brave and risky on behalf of Manzheley to come out in this way, and apparently he has already received threats. David Manzheley is perhaps the one who should be our Saint Patron of the universal orgy. If he had some kind of business in the organization of these parties, this publicity cannot be positive, he is in the eye of the hurricane, or of several hurricanes.
13. One could even point to conspiracies. It is not clear who denounced it: neighbors? Rival organizers of orgies as Manzheley himself claims, thereby exposing to public amazement the existence of that world, and that business? Or is there a (geo) political plot behind?
14. This unusual focus of public attention in the orgy, what repercussions could it have in the face of a wave of repression of orgies in Europe and in the world? News of new parties intervened by the Belgian Police are already coming out, exactly one week after the first. Currently the restrictions of the pandemic are a perfect excuse for interventions. This situation may not only affect the orgies of Manzheley, or those in Brussels, but far beyond. They could also motivate many people who did not know them to be interested in them … Is this going to incite a multiplication of covert police interventions in gay applications? Or that women, children, parents, bosses or neighbors control potential participants in orgies? Anyone can make a fake profile.
15. And finally there is the complex phenomenon of chemsex, of which public opinion has hardly known the existence. Chemsex is a global trend linked to the use of gay dating apps whereby, in the most typical cases, groups of men meet at a home to have group sex, often for a whole weekend, taking very specific and addictive drugs that increase and prolong arousal and reduce hunger and sleepiness, and strictly associated with sex without a condom and extreme practices, especially those focused on the exchange of fluids, the so-called “breeding”.

Chemsex as a paradigm of the orgy in digital control society

Let us pause to analyze the complex phenomenon of chemsex.

I want to clarify that I am an ardent defender of public and orgiastic sex. And yet the chemsex phenomenon, which could seem defensible as an exuberant current mutation of the orgy, is a complex, paradoxal and problematic phenomenon, which condenses to an extreme degree a series of characteristics of current sexual culture and digital society, and that I would like to expand on. I have not practiced it in the first person but I have known it (and suffered) in the second or third, seeing the devastating effects that drug addiction had on people very close to me, effects that apart from those usual in highly addictive drugs, include incapacity to have sex without those drugs and without what accompanies them. It also implies the presumption that sex without a condom is cool because today, in some countries, we have pharmaceutical companies and health systems who pay for the medication that keeps you alive against HIV infections and other STIs.

But paradoxically, the phenomenon, far from making HIV visible, reintroduces a new form of invisibility, through the euphemism of PREPs, preventive medication that can be taken to reduce risks when have sex without a condom. Today it is common to put in the dating application profiles that PREP is taken, to avoid saying that one is undetectable HIV+ when proposing “risk” relationships. PREP is part of the preventive (or better preemptive) culture in today’s control society.

And all this using applications that traffic with the data of users in a society of digital control. Applications that are part, like all viral media, of what I call Panchoreographic, the homogeneous contagion of gestures and behaviors, of which the porn industry that is part of chemsex is also part, disseminating poses and actions that are serially reproduced.

It’s not about being a purist: we’re all in the mud. But neither do I want to easily idealize a phenomenon as complex as this one.

Chemsex forms an unusual planetary orgiastic community of sex and affections, silences and taboos, addictive drugs, STI viruses, viral media, porn, applications that traffic data and population profiles, medications for chronic infections and available to almost anyone who passes per man and have a smartphone. A kind of chemical-cybernetic mutation of the orgy in the era of control.

Given the widespread stigmatization of the orgy, it seems that today it can only manifest itself in ways like this. What is needed is to bring the orgy back and out onto the streets but in a deeper sense, as an experimental way of composing bodies.

The Future is Orgiastic

Let us first distinguish two modes of virality: the so-called viral media that disseminates homogeneous gestures in algorithmic ecologies, and that of molecular viruses as a matrix of mutation in evolution.

From an evolutionary point of view, the orgy undoubtedly is primary, this is its third, deepest, evolutionary and cosmic geopolitical sense.

The attempt to present heterosexual monogamy as superior is part of the evolution of what I call the Algoricene or age of algorithms, an era in which the extreme tendency to reduction, to alignment, has become dominant on Earth. A multitude of geometries have gradually emerged, reducing more and more the indeterminacy in movement and the sensorimotor plasticity of bodies. A first high point comes with linear perspective and mechanism. With thermodynamics the limits of mechanism and the regulation of closed systems are revealed. The nuclear family is part of this attempt to govern energy in the industrial age. This model literally explodes in the Second World War, at which time cybernetics arises, as a much more dynamic double fold of these reductions, a dynamic model of modulation, prediction and anticipation that allows capturing and capitalizing previously useless mutations and flows of desire. Not only modulation: with Big Data the continuous production of the new becomes the operational mode of domination. Control is projected on the infinite spectrum of the potential variation of the bodies: as long as the movement can be reduced to quantification, orienting it.

Orgies have always been there. I propose that they are the quintessential ways of composing bodies in always diverse assemblages or fields, metabodies.

The orgy has never ceased to be present marginally, it is the expression, not only primal, but also richer and more complex, of sex as a cosmic movement of mutation. The problem is rather the constitution of the idea of ​​sex as the reproduction of a defined, atomized, isolated and immunized entity that stands against the evolutionary orgy, and unleashes pandemics that isolate it even more, in an exponential spiral of reduction. The effect of this entity and the millenary algorithmic matrices in which it arises can be seen in climate change, the unsustainable planetary exploitation of humans, other species and resources, and in what the United Nations itself calls the Era of Pandemics.

Orgies like this one in Brussels would seem, on the one hand, to be the most extreme violation of any concept of social distance that can occur in which not only COVID comes into play but a multitude of STIs and STDs. And yet paradoxically they are once more expression of the primal evolutionary orgy in which the great aberration is the atomization of bodies and reproductive monogamy.

This return of the primordial orgy, in its modern, complex and problematic mutation in the era of chemsex has destabilized international politics in the midst of a pandemic, as if not only the Covid virus but the orgiastic ontology of evolution relentlessly returned with its movement, its excess.

The orgy reinstates an economy of excess, generosity, indeterminacy, and variation versus the economy of reserve, retribution, measurement, and repetition.

Instead of continuing the exponential acceleration of an algorithmic model of segmentation, control, domination, atomization and immunization, we have to embrace the evolutionary orgy again.

The fight against climate change, exploitation and pandemics to come can only be through a new planetary orgy, never seen on earth, because we are challenged to overcome the involutional fold of the age of algorithms, which is the radical opposite of the orgy and of evolution.

Although one might wonder if the supposed technological singularity of Artificial Intelligence will not be a cyborg orgy. Donna Haraway said more than 30 years ago in the Cyborg Manifesto, that modern war is a cyborg orgy. But perhaps we have not yet understood the implications of this statement. Can there be an algorithmic orgy? How would it be? Are we already living it in our daily intimiacy with autonomous algorithms like the ones behind every app on every smartphone, including dating apps? Is the true planetary orgy of today an algorithmic, cybernetic and cyborgian orgy, of which we are mere appendices and aggregates? Or are algorithms anti-orgiastic (and counter-evolutionary) by principle in their thrust to reduction?

The orgy haunts us from the most abyssal depths of our molecular composition, from it we come and to it everything returns.

The orgy is the cosmic plane of immanence, the movement of variation and composition. It is Derrida’s différance but without retaining anything, always fluctuating in new variations of a plastic memory and an economy of superabundance. The dance of Zarathustra.

Instead of isolating and immunizing ourselves, we have to regain the orgiastic movement of evolution.

How? The orgy that I propose is not that of chemsex, nor that of cyborg warfare, but another orgy to come, the one I call microsexual: related to unleashing the capacity for sensorimotor variation and plasticity in bodies and their compositions, and the way in which this biochemically affects all the strata of a body and its environments, its relational fields.

The orgy is microsexual and metasexual: it does not know about categories because it mobilizes a mode of sensibility that has nothing to do with the linear perspective that separates and segments us. It is sex as a matrix of indetermination and mutation that – like Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex- affects all levels of composition of a body or metabody, that is, of everything, of the fluctuating fields of movement that we are.

We have it in our molecular heritage, in our ability to move, our proprioception. It is – summing up a complex issue that I develop in other places – about unleashing the body’s capacity for sensorimotor variation, enhancing the plasticity of the sense of proprioception, by which we feel the world in the very act of feeling ourselves as a body, in transformation and in motion. In the process we disalign centuries or millennia of reduction of experience to fixed points of view. There is the starting point that I propose for a movement r/evolution that goes beyond the era of proprioceptive atrophy where the Renaissance perspective dominates, visible still in every smartphone screen.

Faced with the false orgy of viral media of homogeneous contagion, I propose to recover the power of mutation of viruses and bacteria that lies at the depths of our decentralized capacity for movement and perception. To become truly viral is to embrace that orgiastic power that recovers the creative movement of evolution, it is to stop prolonging a tradition in slave societies that has privileged immobility and hatred for the body. An old and new orgiastic sensibility lies in the depths of our tissues, a plastic capacity of infinite variation in movement and compositions, in the metabodies that we compose with the world.

This orgy is one of epigenetic mutation: of our perceptions, behaviors, it proliferates in formless and indeterminate, open, irreducible, but rhythmic ways, of composing the quantum fields of movement that we are, in an eternal becoming, where the highest aspiration of any possible universe is to generate the most varied possible expressions of fluctuation.

The future can only be orgiastic.