200 Gertrude Street Gallery 3 – 25 June 1994

A friend claims that the worst line in any recent film is the line in Damage when Jeremy Irons, in the heat of passion stares at Juliette Binoche and demands in those old, old words: Who are you? Who are you?

Stupid man; said my friend, doesn’t he realize she is anything he desires?

Beyond the dream of the unattainable Other, my friend was suggesting, beyond the play of the mask and the veil are the empty spaces of desire and its transactions. Desire takes place in the gaps, at the rims, not only of the body’s orifices but also in the interstices of familial relations, in the transactions of violence and love, in the negotiations of the look and in the unspoken covenant of the phrases that trace out this space of desire: Fuck me, eat me, give it to me babe.

In This Rose is for Sale Deej Fabyc traces thse spaces of desire, mercantile spaces. Mercantile, not in the sense of a trade or an exchange, but in the sense of an infinite transaction – transactions which carve out conduits of desire. Fabyc plots the conduits of desire across the body and its technologies, through the interstices of the family and its loves and in the sexual transactions of our everyday life. Familial schemes, mercantile dreams…intensity machines. Desire is an intensity machine.

One might think of Lacan’s montage of desire and its drive.

I think, he writes, that the resulting image would show the working of a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap, a peacock’s feather emerges, and ticles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful. Indeed, the thing begins to become interesting from this very fact, that the drive defines…all the forms in which on emay reverse such a mechanism. This does not mean that one turns the dynamo upside-down – one unrolls its wires, it is they that become the peacock’s feather, the gas-tap goes in the lady’s mouth, and the birds rump emerges in the middle.

Or one might evoke Monique Wittig’s poetic litany of the body and its parts in The Lesbian Body — the visceral verse of the corpus and its cavities; of the viscosity of blood and its movement in the circulation of veins and arteries; of the surfaces of the stomach and the abdomen; of the striation of muscle, of the pulsing of the heart, of the contractions of the womb. Circulations of desire in an intensity machine.

But this is not a question of the body and its erogenous zones. The family too is an intensity machine. The incestuous encounter is not the story of a wounded soul but of a gap, an intensity tract…and traction. A seam or opening onto conduits of desire – an intensity machine of violence and love, incest dreams which trace out the channels of an ineluctable bond. It is in the hollowed out paths of mother love and in the malignant circuits of the incestuous collusion that we come to desire. And if Fabyc tracks these paths today to plot the movements of our desire it is not to mourn lost loves or a broken promise, it is not to trace out the space of the wounded soul but to collude once more in that intensity machine, to tread down old paths which mark the fissure of our desire.

Collusion refers to a secret, an intrigue, a machination. Machinations of intensity. Collusion. The therapeutic discourses have tried to hijack the term – to unearth secrets, defuse intrigues, release you from the intense machinations of familial desiring machines, all in the name of the wounded soul. But collusion is the name for the ineluctable bonds between the terminal points of an intensity machine. You cannot avoid collusion.

When a woman offers herself to you in the language of the whorehouse, offers herself to you in the hard currency of desire: This rose is for sale; when a woman whispers down the phone or looks you in the eye, in a flash, in an inescapable moment you are captured in desire. An intensity machine, a collusion, an unavoidable transaction. This is not an exchange but an infinite challenge traced out in the banal spaces of the everyday language of desire: fuck me, eat me, give it to me babe. Let me be your whore.

These banal phrases are the lingua franca of our sexual transactions. They do not obscure an unspoken desire nor do they bring to light the hidden cry of a wounded soul. These phrases, in an instantaneous movement, as lightning through dark skies, cleave out the spaces of desire to bring you to an inevitable collusion. Intensity machines, familial schemes, mercantile dreams. Desire is an intensity machine. And a collusion.

So what of Jeremy Irons? Perhaps we might see things otherwise. Perhaps we might see things otherwise. Perhaps when Jeremy Irons cries Who are you? he is not caught in the anguish of the masquerade, of the mask and the veil, posing for himself the unanswerable question but is instead proposing an unavoidable challenge in the ancient words of desire. Isn’t this the trick of desire and all our intensity machines – that, in an instant, we are called into being s this anonymous whore, as this collusion. In the space traced out by the ancient phrase you are a terminal point in an intensity machine. A transaction, a mercantile dream. Desire is an intensity machine.