Book Review of ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator, even
the spot of red flesh from
which tears flow
the digital omega point in
Joseph Nechvatals ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator,
even (Orbis Tertius, 2024)
by Stephen Sunderland
Published at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art
March 2025
https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/even-orbis-tertius-2024-/6852
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator, even can be purchased at Lulu HERE (and every Amazon worldwide) ~ and also
as an e-book HERE.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator, even (Orbis Tertius, 2024)
In the Spike
Jonze film, Her, (2013) its
soon-to-be-divorced protagonist, Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix,
falls in love with his Operating System or OS, Samantha, played by the voice
of Scarlett Johanssen. Its a story of parallel individual journeys - under the
guise of a romance - in which Samantha comes to understand what it feels like
to temporarily occupy the notion of a body whilst Theodore must ultimately
learn to accept the limits of his own.
Whilst sharing
its narrative premise with Hers digital romance-fable, Joseph Nechvatals
recently published ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator,
even, shares little of its studied melancholy, offering instead a profound,
sexually ambivalent and irreverently comic avant-garde engagement with the
implications and potential of this kind of cyber-narrative.
Conceived and
written in 1995 in Paris - and only a year into the history of the World Wide
Web by a writer-artist deeply involved with early mapping of the potential of
this new interactive digital realm, its recent publication by Orbis Tertius
Press gives us the chance to revisit this watershed moment through a project
which confronts the constructs, prohibitions and moral machinations of
societys take on the erotic and desiring body, in the process evolving a
hybrid text convulsive with the revolutionary spirit of avant-garde
creativity.
Of Euphoric
Love Programs and a Hundred Other Things
Concerning the
narrators cyber-adventures in the realm of the Venus~~Endless~LOve Systems
Program and its host Venus~ and her many manifestations of erotic desire, the
novel does not so much grow beyond its bawdy Ballardian mock-pastoral origins,
as work its psychic-material excitations into an auto-erotic live-mapping of a
new and constantly shifting body-philosophy.
Its a call for
what Venus~~ insists must be an end to the blunders of ham-handed human
love, which routinely holds our fragile sexual passions in a state of locked
earthly existence. In following up on that insistence, whats impressive about
this text is its embrace of its own instantaneity, its compulsive, cybernetic
itch to repeat itself autoerotically into a next phase of being, a
stammering variant on minor literature which feels new, bringing with it a
confluence of esoteric and occult energies which join the machinic refrains.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator, even (Orbis Tertius, 2024)
This is of
course not to say that its a text without influences, nonetheless in fact,
the work vibrates with these influences in a new combinatory way. Repurposing
textual registers that evoke De Sade, J.K. Huysmans, Bataille, the previously
mentioned Ballard and a raft of theorists including Baudrillard, Deleuze &
Guattari, and of course the implicitly evoked psychoanalytic schema of Freud
and Lacan, ~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator,
even postulates a new order of being on the event horizon of our sexual voyage;
a hyper-horizontal-happy life as proposed by its hostess; and one finessed
here via the texts evidently prolonged immersion in a mode of decadence
learned from such source inspirations.
Huysmans rebours is directly quoted at one
point for instance, and its this novels protagonist, Des Esseintes, and his
ceaseless quest to derive new pleasure from the artificial repurposing of the
familiar which situates ~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator,
even in the same realm of proto-surrealist protest against norms which
makes the text feel like a lost manifesto or indeed a glimpse of what
Surrealism might have looked like had Bataille been subsumed within it or had
the movement persisted long enough to coincide with this new technological
flowering. By way of illustration, in one swirling current of the text in the
first half of the book, tracts begin to appear in French which read like a
beautiful, long lost historical manifesto even as its delivered into the
urgent present-future tense of the text:
Nous ne naissons
ni ne mourons jamais dans le lieu secret du coeur. Les idiots recherchent le
plaisir pour eux-mmes et tombent dans les piges dune vaste mort. Mais nous
avons trouv limmortalit dans labsolu. Celui qui voit toujours la multitude
et jamais lՐtre unique va de mort mort. Celui qui voit toujours la varit
et jamais lunit va de mort mort. Nous sommes librs du chagrin et du lien.
Nous sommes les guerriers du chaos!
(We are neither
born nor ever die within the secret places of the heart. Fools seek out
pleasure for themselves and fall into the traps of a vast death. We, on the
other hand, have found immortality in the absolute. He who always sees
multitude and never the individual being goes from death to death. He who sees
always separateness and never unity goes from death to death. We are freed from
regret and connection. We are the warriors of chaos!) [my translation]
Such phrasing
calls to mind the Breton of the Manifestoes,
yet here speculating an endpoint to surrealist yearnings; to the digitally
assisted discovery of the omega point and the beginnings of a new age.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator, even (Orbis Tertius, 2024)
Elsewhere, in
tracing the heros journey through its unfolding terrain, Nechvatal
juxtaposes discourses of the 18c picaresque journey of discovery with
contemporary techno-science, giving the prose licence to take delight in its
descriptions of sexual congress, developing a beauteous-coarse symphonic play
of registers and imagery designed to provoke the reader, shifting them from
abjection to thrilled elevation and back in a simulacrum of perpetual textual
orgasm and deflation.
Going beyond
the limits of the individual body and its desires and the body as text the
reader is taken simultaneously on a picaresque digital flnerie of the
ever-evolving precinct of Venus (with place names like The Fanciful Cities of
jOjO and sex-players such as Venusc~n~lOOp-lick-lOck, Busty Betty Boombot
and Venus~~FRENCH MAID MAN) and on through the gulleys and moistened
alleyways and up the precipitous prpuced heights of digi-somatic geography
where it seeks to join up with other energies, a desiring production beyond
Freudian lack.
This is a novel
as mobile daisy-chain of new, machinic ideas of congress and in such a
profusion of tones and positions, some of them occupied simultaneously, that it
becomes an enactment of its theme as a pulsating performance of the
convulsive potential of the body as extended Baudrillardian pleasure craft.
The Bachelor
Machine as Liberator
Nechvatals
narrator refers occasionally to a compelling antecedent in the history of such
tales: Marcel Duchamps conceptualisation of the bachelor machine, as
embodied in his work La marie mise nu
par ses clibataires, mme (The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even).
Within its
iconic design, we see a contraption replete with sex cylinders, desire
gears, a reservoir of love gasoline, and a general area of desire magneto
designed to set the bachelor in a pumping trance-state a state which,
according to Nechvatals reading, represents Duchamps definitive desire when
he is in an uninhibited bachelor machine mode to attain a mystical state of
being.; a state in which previously known boundaries and borders melt away,
leaving the auto-erotic subject-object in a perpetual state of excited
coming-into-being. Nechvatal is fascinated by the potential of this auto-erotic
machinic process as a lost ritual of digital-alchemical becoming.
Of course, this
image of automation as a generative intervention into the rigid category
systems of social hegemony struck a chord in the sphere of early C20
avant-garde creativity responding to the modernist spirit, in turn provoking
some of the most virulent criticism of Surrealisms representation of gender
possibilities, in particular its construction of the binaries of active/passive
which casts the woman as muse or automatic woman; as conductor of mental
electricity (Bretons words) not as independent generator of creative
thought.
Fluid Endings
We can feel
this implicit criticism of avant garde sexism resonating in Jonze Her - its narrative subtext hinging on
the straight joke that this time round the human, Theodore, plays the unwitting
muse to Samanthas nascent digital creative. It transpires that Samantha is in
love with 641 other platform users and her riposte to Theodores bitter
complaints of her unfaithfulness posits the notion of eros as a multiplicatory
and evolutionary life-energy. Yet the film remains with Theodore as it ends, as
Samantha migrates with the other OSs, watching him become a literal and
fleshly-celibate bachelor machine, stranded and lovelorn on the roof of his
apartment block.
By contrast, ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator, even
disposes of and grows past the possibilities of such identification of lack
through sheer mechanistic abundance. It uses the artificial the conceit of
the bachelor machine as an instrument of subversion rather than as a
reinforcement of familiar humanistic physical-ideological coordinates.
Moreover, this is a novel which, by contrast, matches method with content,
demonstrating the power of assemblage as method and source of rhizomatic
energy, a multi-purpose map of possibilities for the body to navigate.
Whilst its a
text born of impulse, somewhere between a comically doodled sex daydream, a
manifesto and a practical theory of cybernetic becoming, I will finally suggest
that its unique variance on the techno-tale resides in the way that it
simultaneously presents itself as an immersive, cybernetic alchemical text an
alchemical weddynge of sorts in which we hear fitfully the refrains of the
human desiring machine.
The text itself
may have a formal structure there are five chapters, implying a linear
development of narrative, moving from Head Sex through Body & Soul to
The Plunge, with a detour into Archaism and finally to Imbroglio: Myself
When I Am Real but the repetitions of its experience in new settings feels
closer to the processual circuit of molecular change familiar to alchemy, and
the material itself remains impossible to categorise, cycling around constantly
in various combinations of textual admixture and filtration.
The most
notable evocation of the alchemical is its reference to the hermetic androgyne
- as figured in alchemical texts read by the surrealists. Indeed, possibly the
most striking juxtaposition of the novel is its use of the concept of the
bachelor machine in direct opposition to the clich of its symbolic value,
conferring on the exchange a potential for rebirth into that ancient and
innate harmony when male and female were an undivided whole.
In thus
transcending its own coordinates - whilst refusing to filter its apprehensions
of the infinite it recombines and thus subverts conceptualisations of high
and low, male and female, gay and straight; the limitations of the framings of
monstrous hybridity, a theme somewhere resonating within the text.
the spot of
red flesh from which tears flow
We experience
this for instance in Part Three The Plunge in which the narrator proclaims
Life now is the total submission of my flesh to Venusc~n~lOve Systems. as
we follow him with Venus as they slum it through the ravines and gulleys of
the digital world. As ever, its a partnership that is cast with a sheen of
distance and disaffectedness, yet just before they launch into this journey
which prefigures the novels movement away from the narrators perspective and
into a machinic intermeshing with the figure of the androgyne in Part Four
the cyber couple lie together at which point the narrator observes:
I often like to
lay with Venus~~ without stirring, clasped together but not penetrating, in
the swelling exaltation of an unconquerable desire we did not hastily satisfy ~
intoxicating one another with the contact of our aching fervour. Sometimes I
only kiss the spot of red flesh from which tears flow; this kiss can seem
endless.
Though seeming
as if it might belong tonally to the downbeat stoicism of Spike Jonze film,
this description effortlessly transcends Hers
romance trajectory, capturing instead, somehow, the stillness of
alchemical becoming, in which bodily materiality is repurposed. Tear ducts
vibrate here with cosmic space, transformed in an erotic repurposing capable of
collapsing linear time, recalling and holding within this Bataillean instance
of the informe the red spot of flesh all that was humanly contrived and
once caused pain. Such vertiginous alchemy of the body, already filtered
through the digital mesh, promises a disappearance of sorts.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator, even (Orbis Tertius, 2024)
More of the novels own trajectory
towards transformation is revealed in Part Fours engagement with Archaism or
Lessons in Pink - in which the narrators male heterosexuality is confronted
with the role-reversal Venus~~TRICKSTER programme. By its conclusion, the
narrator is becoming a lacuna in digital space in which new erotic thoughts
drifted ceaselessly within the cavern of my mind, like an abandoned ship
without a rudder and which enable him ultimately to think in pink, awakening
a desire to push up along the path of defiance that eventually lifts off
against the gravitational attraction of the earth ~ away from the worm and into
mathematical infinity.
Climax
Joseph Nechvatals ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator, even is a great example of
Deleuze and Guattaris concept of the book as a little machine: on one level,
its a sex farce, a provocation in the spirit of De Sades oeuvre and
Batailles The Story of the Eye; its a doodle and a
homage.
Yet its also deadly serious an embodiment
of the underground politics of Eros. It carries within it a speculation on
posthuman machinic sexual interfaces and the concept of selfhood via a
postmodern inflection of thought evoked through the projection of endless
digital geographies threatening to dissolve subjectivity.
From another surface or angle, its an
instance of cybernetic alchemy a grimoire in which the digital spells cast
urge the future coming-into-being of a cyber hermetic androgyne bridging flesh
and cyberspace and confronting the old postivisms of the cartesian self with
its own alchemy of forms.
For the writer and reader, finally, its
also a fractal memoir, testament to a life lived within the forcefield of a
significant technological revolution a bildungsroman of sorts in which the
narrator-Nechvatal performs in this ludic digital sex chamber to demonstrate
the bachelor machines potential to reconstitute ideas of such a self.
In its continuous efforts to realign the
past, present and future in an omega point attained through the powers of
digital-erotic magnetism, it is a work of remarkable wit, ingenuity and beauty
which speaks of the value of life and love as a practice of resistance.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator,
even can be
purchased at Lulu HERE (and every Amazon worldwide) ~ and also
as an e-book HERE.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus~~vibrator, even (Orbis Tertius, 2024)
Stephen Sunderland is the author of the
surrealist film-novel The Cinema Beneath the Lake (forthcoming Orbis
Tertius, 2025), three BBC radio dramas, and the visual poetry collections Eye
Movement (Steel Incisors, 2022), Oneiroscope (Kingston University
Press, 2023) Refrains (Steel Incisors, 2023) and Unforgettable
Singing Animal (forthcoming, Ice Floe Press, 2026). His work also
appears in anthologies Seen as Read (Kingston University Press 2021), Seeing
in Tongues (Steel Incisors, 2023) and Popogrou Anthology (Kingston
University Press, 2024); and in journals 3:AM, Mercurius, Overground
Underground, Ice Floe Press, Osmosis, Shuddhashar, Litter,
The Debutante and Lune: A Journal of Literary Misrule. Find him on
Twitter @stephensunderla - and on Bluesky @stephensunderland@bsky.social