Stonewalled III: Post Modernist Sexuality

Sexuality is a biological drive, but it is also a figment of the imagination. If consciousness is ever separated from the body, with our species preserved as pixels of intelligence migrating through cyberspace, then the very notion of what it means to be male and female will revert to being a fiction.  Our present culture is obsessed with pornography, which has become infinitely ubiquitous and is still looked at as a virus which distracts unwary minds from a more innocent sexuality—which they might be more prone to undertake had they not become so infected. But is there reason to believe that pornography has become the fuel for migrating consciousnesses that are increasingly separated from the mother ship? We are still men and women, made of flesh and blood and hormones, but increasingly we find our functions usurped by technology. No wonder radically fundamentalist religions are so intent on shielding their followers from the influences of modernity. Enlightenment ideals of reason and equanimity have no  place amidst the brute inequities of biology. It’s no wonder that there is so much sexual dysfunction in the battered and defeated armies of heterosexual culture.  However, there is a hope. Once mankind has totally done away with its dependence on the body—Ray Kurzweil’s idea of immortality coming in the form of organs made from microprocesssors is only one of a number of possible outcomes—then sex will take its rightful place as one of a number of cultural institutions for which tickets are purchased say like for Lincoln Center or BAM.

Madness and Death

Perhaps Laurence Olivier is such a mythical figure that one takes him for granted. But his virtuosity was once again confirmed in a recent screening of his 1948 Hamlet at the The NewYork Psychoanalytic Institute. Ernest Jones wrote a classic tome entitled Hamlet and Oedipus, and no matter what philosophical or psychological filter one applies to Olivier's classic performance—whose greatness, like the Mona Lisa’s smile, lies in ambiguity itself—the subject of the so-called Oedipus complex is an unavoidable theme, making a psychoanalytic institute the perfect venue for such a revival. Stanley Holloway stands out in particular as the gravedigger, presiding over his little kingdom from the floor of Ophelia’s grave and offering the measurements of death itself. Heidegger claimed that the awareness of death was crucial to living an “authentic” existence, and this scene, more than any modern treatment of the dying process, tries to take the hereafter into account in the most empirical way possible. About Ophelia, the gravedigger says, "One that was a woman, sir, but rest her soul, she's dead." Ironically, later, in trying to explain his rash actions to Laertes, Hamlet attributes the loss of his self to madness. Foucault wrote a book called Madness and Civilization, but a good subtitle for the Olivier Hamlet, and the way it emphasizes the extinction of personality, could be Madness and Death.