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Voices from an Innerspace
'Valie Export
Valie Export
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'Susanne Widl
Susanne Widl
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'Patricia Jünger
Patricia Jünger
An intermedial persona performance featuring Susanne Widl
Media concept: Valie Export & Peter Weibel
Music: Patricia Jünger
Set: Perdita Chan
Make-up: Karin Schön
Scenario and Dramaturgy: Peter Weibel
Director: Karl Welunschek
Electronics and Lighting: Franz Xaver
Video Engineering: Muki Pakesch
Cinematography and Stills: Gerhard Riml
Slide Animation: H. W. PangratzVOICES FROM AN INNER SPACE The solo performance comprises animated slides, slide and video projections, three-dimensional objects, music and architecture of language. A score determines the interaction between the action on stage and the immaterial scenes supplied by the media. Visual and acoustic sources (video recorder, tape, slide projector, spotlights, etc.) are computer-controlled.
The media-based part of the performance is a meeting place of Unica Zürn, Mae West, Mary Shelley, Ada Lovelace, Linda Lovelace and the polyphonic woman of the future – all of them, live and on video, played by Susanne Widl. The text-based performance develops from polymorphous, polyphonic female history. The female image is determined by the facets of woman as a mother, lover, companion, prostitute, fighter, artist, scientist or witch. These projections created by our cultural background, however, diverge from woman's notion of herself. This leads to ambivalence, unrest and rupture resulting in a sex that is not self-contained ("le sexe qui n'est pas une", L. Irigaray). "Voices from an Inner Space" are the authors of the polylogous, polymetric texts reflecting female longing, rejection, desire, the urge to rewrite the law of violence, the polyaesthetic historical outside. The voices in the female inner space alternate which the other voices, those of culture outside, which is phallocratic.
An attempt is made to decipher and reconstruct the unconscious (social) text that our society has laid down in its myths, from classical to modern ones (from Oedipus to vampires), in its cultural creations and in the writings and bodies of women.THE ANAGRAMMATIC BODY Anagrams are words and sentences resulting from the transposition of letters of given words or sentences.
(Hans Bellmer) If you are trying to find a new sentence by transposing letters in a given sentence, you are looking for a new meaning which is concealed in the given sentence- the transposition of letters will bring it to light. Transcending and changing a given meaning (of a given sentence, body, sex, life) is sought within the boundaries of conscious limitation. A new sentence, a new meaning, a new life, if everything was different … – that would be too easy and is not the case anyway. One should (and must, as we will see later on) find the Other's language in the same language, the same letters, the same sex and the same body. As there is only one life, there is also only one sentence. You can only find a different meaning within the Same when the existing meaning is insufficient. Thus, the anagrammatic quest is a longing for the perennial changeability within the One and the Same, transcendency within immanency, as the number of letters to be used is as limited as the number of years of one's life (cf. chapter "Body and Number"). Anagrammatic activities in finding new words have formal und mechanical traits, as such activities are carried out in the framework of determined mechanical rules and a finite number of operations. Therefore, the result is not a priori marked by subjectivity, but something different: a level beneath, behind or beyond the I seems to express itself, i.e. mechanical principles, conformity with laws (linguistic laws, the law of the father, etc.).
The principles underlying the formal combination of elements at the same time require investigative skills and utmost concentration allowing one to detect the deepest and rarest combinations, which only an utterly sophisticated subject is capable of. The absolute is seemingly accepted with some amount of fatalism and passivity, as the given sentence is not questioned. The sentence, the sentence's meaning, the sentence's truth and unequivocality is questioned only inasmuch as letters are jumbled; thus a new meaning is created, a new truth and a new sentence. The former sentence is unmasked as ambiguous, its aspirations to absoluteness and the status of a law are thwarted. The revolt against the law of the father takes place in the existing set of signs, not in the invention of new ones. The voice of the Other in the Same, the discovery of several valid meanings in one and the same sentence, the polyphonic chant confuse the monotheistic voice of the father aspiring to the status of law alone. Polyphony and polylogy, the female way of speaking, interrupt the paternal soliloquys, crack the code of the law based on unequivocality, shatter the message of the father's voice and the law itself to pieces, almost extinguish and silence them, like the din of voices and the variety of frequencies turn messages into noise, indistinct, undefined waves, when the tuning indicator moves from one station to the next. "Confused speech" thus complements anagrammatic speech, which is a most rational activity, a revolt against ratio by rational means. If ratio itself were always capable of finding the meaning, which it suppresses by saying one thing, by transposing the Other (anagrammatically). But no, a historical and historically dominating form of ratio characterizes confusion, ambiguity and polyphony as female features and calls what it lacks itself the other one's shortcomings, in philosophy as much as in everyday life.
"A sentence is like a body, apparently inviting us to break it down into components, so its true content reconstitutes itself over and over again in an endless row of anagrams", Hans Bellmer, de-facto husband of Unica Zürn, wrote. In this way, his project "Die Puppe" (The Doll), a series of designs and photographs, begun in 1933 and finished in 1954, the year Hans Bellmer met Unica Zürn, developed an anagrammatic approach to the body. At first, it dealt with shifts and changes, reflections and analogies in the elements of one and the same body, e.g. the possible identity of arms and legs, genitals and armpits, noses and heels or the affinity of breasts and buttocks, mouth and genitals. A woman's vagina may be situated between her thumb and index finger, between her feet pressed together, in her ear or her throat (cf. Linda Lovelace). At a different level, it may also be the projection of one onto the Other, e.g. the projection of a phallus onto a woman's finger, arm, leg or even the heel of her shoe (fetishistic projection), or onto the entire female body (breasts as testicles and torso as penis, or the body of Mae West in a tight-fitting dress, with her male gait adding to the impression of a swelling penis). Finally, there are transpositions, strangely hermaphroditic combinations of parts of the male and female bodies, with the dominating structure being either female or male. "The male and the female images have become interchangeable" (Hans Bellmer). In most cases, however, the female image is not characterized by the vagina, but by a senso-motorical simulation of the phallus, e.g. in a vision of a behind turned into a face (buttocks as testicles). Simulating the vagina and projecting the phallus are two types of technique used to subject the female body to male characteristics. The anagrammatic dissection of a body and the rearrangement of the parts in a new body are, for the most part, transpositions at the physical and symbolic levels with an opposite final effect. Male desire aims at exchanging a male I for a female Thou, thus deleting the other sex or loving oneself in the Other. The passion of love stems from this transposition. The desirable girl first becomes a phallic sister (a buddy in the Mae West vein) and finally a hermaphroditic prick cannibalistically devouring and displaying the inherent female characteristics. This is actually the other, under-cover meaning, the meaning of transfer, which "is the truth of love" (Lacan), brought to light by the anagrammatic body. The transfer, i.e. true love, seeks a dissected body, or at least a new body (created by the transformation of parts).
This is why love and death, the highest, the absolute law, are so closely connected. Beatrice Slama on female sexuality: "Marguerite Duras is the first woman to show female desire which does not shrink from the death-wish, in all its starkness. The wish to kill and to be killed pervades her entire work. The vision of the woman beheaded and dismembered on the sheets on which she made love; the fascination emanating from the man whose love does not stop at murder; the erotic attraction of the strangled woman – an attraction which leads to identification with the Other and becomes the desire to be the Other – and to get killed oneself. "'You kill me, you do me good.' Nobody is closer to the victim than the killer, says Duras." (in: Das Sexuelle, die Frauen und die Kunst, Hg. Karin Rick, Konkursbuch 20/1987, p. 133) and we experience love in the form in which it is reflected in male dreams. In our phallocratic culture, there is no other form of love than phallic love, which female desire apparently accepts. The dissected body is first and foremost the given phallocratic text, which can only be re-written in anagrammatic terms. Love wishes that the body is born under its law. Genetic engineering is the monstrous side of this kind of love. It was the love which prompted Mary Shelley to create her "new Prometheus", the monster, the horror dummy of Dr. Frankenstein, the artificial body, whose composition Dr. Frankenstein was especially interested in. Only rarely "appears the sentence which, read upstream or downstream, treated as a woman or a man, keeps its undestroyable meaning" (Hans Bellmer).BODY AND NUMBER The philologian's anagrams are the mathematician's permutations. Transposing letters and parts of the body is a numeration, albeit a simple one. The anagrammatic body involves dividing the body and multiplying parts of it. Private parts, such as breasts, are multiplied in various locations, multiple lips and eyes appear on buttocks and breasts (cf. Shelley's vision of Mary). The anagrammatic body is a body permuted, numerically transformed, a body of multiplied organs, a body as an image, the advent of the immaterial, digitalized body. Body and number entered into a deteriorating relationship in phrenology, a science flourishing in the 19th century. Baudelaire has a better explanation for the connection between body and number in the anagrammatic body: "Glorifying the cult of imagery, the cult of multiplied sensation. – The pleasure of multiplying numbers. Drunkenness equals number. The number is in the individual." The body as a number is reflected in the anagrammatic body. The number of organs within a body is as finite as the number of letters in the alphabet. The number of sentences one can put together in a finite alphabet is, however, as infinite as the number of bodies. Thus, the actual desire of the anagrammatic body lies in the transfinite, as it knows that the transfinite can be attained by pure numeration. This is where the obsession with numbers (permutable, dividable, multipliable numbers) stems from, be it in Unica Zürn's numerical delusions concerning relationships or Ada Lovelace's higher mathematics. The number of letters turns into the number of years of one's life. Unica Zürn wrote "Ermenonville: 12 letters. The total of the digits of 12 is 3 … 3 times 3 equals 9. Grunewald, where I grew up, consists of 9 letters." She wanted to live to the age of 54, "because 4 plus 5 equals 9." Unica Zürn committed suicide at the age of 54.
Projections, exchanges, transfers and simulations are the basic techniques of an anatomical grammar. The changeable, re-arrangeable body, however, does not only represent the desire to reject the female connotation and to disintegrate the body, remove the walls separating man and woman, body and mind, but also a longing to abolish death, to remove the boundary between the organic and the inorganic, leading to de-organization, as it were. A woman without organs, a mere torso, "woman-head and legs-without arms" (Unica Zürn) has many disguises: monster, mummy, doll, pin-up, model, machine, vampire, etc. "This beautiful, dangerous human creature, half girl, half snake …" is bloodthirsty. "Therefore, they took all her vital organs … eyes, tongue, heart and so on, so as to render her harmless. As she was so beautiful, they wanted to keep her a feast for the eyes by skillfully mummifying her, which made her look alive. When all was done, we were appalled to find that the creature was able to speak without tongue, to see without eyes and to live without heart, it was strong without blood in its veins and obviously made plans without having a brain anymore", Unica Zürn described a dream, asking herself, "Was that creature me?" In her dream of the woman without organs, Zürn quotes all the female mythical disguises, transformations and disfigurements, the snake, the mummy, the vampire (the bloodless creature); such nightmares also recur in other women's dreams. This is why this performance aims at restoring to women their organs, in particular tongue and eyes. Owing to the anagrammatic body, women attain the perspective that life and mind can be created artificially by transposing the letters of life, the genetic code, the language of mathematics. To Mary Shelley, Frankenstein's monster proved that it was possible to manufacture a body. Ada Lovelace thought that mathematical thinking in the human brain could be replaced and simulated by an inanimate mechanism, a machine. "Perhaps a corpse could be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth", Mary Shelley wrote. Mechanical human beings and artificial life are proliferations of the numerical, anagrammatic body.VICTORIAN VICTIMS Unica Zürn, Mae West, Mary Shelley, Ada Lovelace, Linda Lovelace – they are all influenced by the anagrammatic body, marked by identity crises in their socially, i.e. phallically defined, female roles as mothers and wives, as reflections of the desires of men and children. They look for something different, by transforming their bodies, by refusing to fit in with the traditional female image. For Zürn, Shelley and Lovelace, their bodies, "cumbersome" to Unica Zürn, their lethargy, their livelessness, their silence, their coldness, their disturbances of gait and equilibrium, their heavy bleeding become expressions of protest against a female identity forced upon them. The body becomes "a homestead of illnesses" (Zürn). They embark on an anagrammatic fight, i.e. passive and rebellious at the same time, against the conventional stereotype of woman as a queen-bee, a partner in endless organism, a personified placenta, a body permeated with sex, a phallic spider with multiplied organs (Mae West), a mechanical fucking, swallowing and sucking machine (Linda Lovelace), a tongue- and speechless creature (Unica, Linda). They are looking for a new meaning in the original sentence on woman. They want to transpose the letters in the word, give a new meaning to the female notion in the word "woman". Their means of revolting is the anagram as the language of the Other. At the same time, they are victims, leaving their traces in the anagram of the body.
Even though Mae West will not seem to be a case in point at first sight, these women are victims of the process by which the female was manufactured in the mould of the industrial Revolution since 1800. Moreover, most of them are also victimized by one of the greatest social taboos of our age, the relationship between mother and daughter, which usually provides the matrix for the relationship between daughter and future husband.
In accordance with the electro-mechanical industrial revolution, two types of modern bodies were shaped, a reproductive (female) one and a productive (male) one. Thus, women were not only alienated from the production of their own bodies, but also from the process of building a modern society, which was reserved to productive machines and bodies. From the 19th century onwards, women were barred from constructing reality and reduced to the biological functions of reproduction (or, in popular terms, of being a housewife, of living for kitchen, church and children). All the above-mentioned women made their first steps towards rebellion and suffered their first traumatic wounds in the field of reproduction. They all are basically "Victorian victims".
19th-century women are generally described as awfully frustrated creatures; the main reason for their frustration, however, was not so much tyrannical husbands and lack of eroticism, but widespread infant mortality. 19th-century women saw most or even all of the children they had given birth to die after a few months or years. Such a sad experience was invariably linked to society's critical attitude to boot: the death of their children was proof of their inability to fulfil their duties as women, mothers, wives. Mary Shelley was no exception. Her first three children died soon after they had been born. Given such cruel experience in natural reproduction, it comes as no surprise that a young girl would dream of artificially producing life and body. Frankenstein and his monster must be seen as a reaction to the male delusion of reproductive biology and the budding mechanization of the world in the Industrial Revolution. A thread of blood, from still birth to abortion (Mae West, Linda Lovelace; Unica Zürn had three) and incessant psychotic bleeding (Ada), pervades the history of modern women.
The rejection of (socially and phallically defined) female notions is also reflected in the revolt against the mother- fighting one's mother means fighting the female image she represents. Mothers are supervisory authorities of society, dominating and haunting their daughters to the point of suicide or hospitalization in a mental home. Mothers do not want to relinquish the supervision over their children, they do not want to accept the fact that their daughters are independent women. Daughters may choose between becoming women like their mothers or no women at all. They are beaten, held in dependence, oppressed, supervised or interned (cf. Unica, Ada, Linda). Unica Zürn "climbs into her mother's bed and is frightened by this huge, fat body … the unsatisfied woman assaults the little girl with moist open lips, a naked tongue curling out, as long as the object that her brother conceals in his trousers." The phallic tongue symbolizes the phallic mother, which (along with a father fixation caused by an aversion of the mother) invariably puts the young girl under the law of the father from which incestuous or lesbian desires represent the only way out. Mae West is a phallic mother, "the mother superior of the faggots and some rival queens" (Parker Tyler). Unica and Ada have special affection for their fathers. The father teaches the girl the logic of absence, of lack, of death. As she wants to be where he is and not where she is, the longing for absence and death, a feeling of not-wanting-to-be, leaves an imprint on the girl's central nervous system. She acquires the language of the absent man: women are inferior creatures subsisting on a lack of something that only an authoritarian male can make up for. Thus, female notions are instinctively refused (even in a masculine vamp like Mae West) and there is a readiness to accept the life of a pariah: the eyes are forever searching for a male complement.BODY, LANGUAGE, MACHINE As analogies of each other, body and language can be broken down into their components (the elements of the body and language, i.e., words and limbs) and put back together again. The permutations and combinations resulting from a finite number of elements – the alphabet of language and the organs of the body – are infinite. This reflects the arithmetics of anatomy and the grammar of language, a physical and a verbal anagrammatics, complying with the rules of a rigid formalism. Each formal system can be reduced to a physical mechanism. A mechanical system is but the physical representation, the embodiment of a formalism. Not only is the body a language, it is also a machine (and a machine language). There are many accounts of women who have experienced their body as a machine (e.g., a car that is a stomach – Leonara Carrington), or a stomach giving birth to a city (Unica Zürn). A number of female artists have also developed metaphors for the body as a chair, a room (e.g. Mae West's face as a room, depicted by the female artist S. Dali) and as a city. The body as a machine visualizes man as an automat. Mechanical models have been made of the womb as well as of the brain: artificial automats, replacing or simulating the natural creation of life and ideas. Language as a body and the body as language: the insurrection against language, the anagrammatical reprogramming of existing natural sentences and words result in an artifical language. This is also an insurrection against the natural body, in favor of the artifical body. Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace pursued a vision of the artificial body, the robot and an artificial brain, a computer. Artificial life and artificial intelligence stem from the experience of women in the age of the industrial revolution. Women from U. Zürn to L. Lovelace have seen man as an automat, the body to be both language and machine.THE POLYPHONOUS ALPHABET OF THE BODY AND THE LOST VOWEL If we assume that the body is like a sentence that can be taken, broken down and put back together again like an anagram, we can also create an alphabet of the body and, from this, reconstruct the unconscious social text that speaks of women. In doing this, we discover that there is a lost vowel, the vagina. In the body of the alphabet as well as in the alphabet of the body our culture has introduced a chiffre for emptiness, a symbol for loss: the vagina. This unconscious social text can be read in the modern myths, in the horror stories of the 19th century (the mummy, the vampire, Dracula, Frankenstein), the horror and porno films of the twentieth century. At the same time, the cultural establishment produces texts of silence and repression. The dead child that is to be resuscitated, the body that may rise from us dead again, this phantasm of the Victorian mother is reflected in the myth of the mummy. For many dead children, the mother's stomach is a coffin, the body a crypt. Dracula is an anagram of the mummy, just as the vampire is an anagram of Dracula. The dangerous creature we have heard about – part Melusine, part Sirene, part daughter, part snake – is the vampire, the creature without blood, one that lives from the blood of others, the vamp, the dangerous woman, the femme fatale with her fatal strategies of seduction. The vampire (invented, in 1842, by J.M. Rymer and T.P. Prest and, in 1916, by Lord Byron and his doctor William) is afraid of light, is a creature without shadow and without a reflection. Like Dracula (introduced, in 1897, by Bram Stoker), he drinks the blood of his victims and also makes them ghosts of the night. Bodiless, he wanders through walls and doors. Like vampires, the victims of the female vamp (from Theda Bara in "The Vampire" of 1915 to Marlene Dietrich) burn like moths circling a light bulb. In the opera "The Woman without a Shadow" (1919) by Richard Strauss, composed after Hugo von Hofmannsthal's libretto, the woman without a shadow refers to a woman who has renounced motherhood, who by depriving the emperor of a successor inflicts him with such sorrow that he turns to stone. When a young woman of modest means sells her shadow for luxury and beauty, her husband yells: "The woman is crazy, strike fire so that I can see her face!" By giving up her social mask (the mother), the woman startles her husband so much that he, for the first time, wants to see her face, as it could be the wrong mask, the wrong woman. When the cultural establishment transforms the witch and vampire myths, the woman is defamed. The price a vamp such as Mae West must pay – even if she is of her own making – is that she remains without children. "I never wanted children. I was afraid that this would change my body and soul. Motherhood is a career in itself. A woman who is married and has children cannot be a sex symbol. If one is single everyone thinks one belongs to him. This boosted the development of this Mae West. But it also caused me a lot of trouble", Mae West writes herself. In the vamp's supposed triumph of the vamp, the self-created sex symbol, the compromises and the sacrifices (numerous abortions) the woman had to make shimmer through. Others, like Marilyn Monroe, succumbed to having to serve the industry as a sex goddess. In the final analysis, the vamp also obeys the logic of phallocentrism, even if she transforms and deforms it anagrammatically.
The snake symbolizes how the anagrammatic body lends itself to combinations, the siren of seduction, the vamp. By the same token, Melusine symbolizes the innocent girl, the untouched, untuned alphabet that willingly dances to the master's tune. Under phallocentrism the letters of the body become a text of destruction, the destruction of others and of oneself. Even if it is the women's own dream, the anagrammatic body is an expression of this phallic destruction.
Unica Zürn's anagram "The White with a Red Dot" illustrates this. The subtext of this text, a seemingly formalistic play on words, reveals a woman's resistance to a traumatic experience. This personal, deeply feminine experience is staged in letters, only to then be distorted. The whimpering spirit of the dead is the child aborted or miscarried. The woman, now nothing but a postscriptum of life, swims in the red of blood. The body is a chamber of pain, the white the red dot (the red, bleeding wound of the vagina). "Frankenstein", too, is such an anagrammatic text, conveying the intimate, incestuously complex relationships of the Shelley, Godwin, Byron families. It is a text that "renounces" the traumatic experiences of woman in the age of the industrial revolution. The monster sums up the Hegelian dialectic of man and woman, of master and servant, man and technology with the following statement: "You have created me, but I am your master." The unbearable ideas and experiences are not integrated by the ego, also not translated into the unconscious, since the body is not abandoned in the identification of body and language. But, as J. Derrida states, it is precisely the body that the translation abandons. ("To abandon the body, this is where the real energy of translation lies".) The condemnation of what is inflicted on the woman by culture is stifled in the tumult of letters. In an anagrammatic text, the woman speaks with a distorted voice. Only there, in the verbal body, is it possible for the mutilated, anagrammatic body to speak of its wounds. The red wound of the vagina becomes the white wound of death. Wonder and wound become one as love and death ("the wonder and the death connected with its appearance", U. Zürn), as an expression of an infliction. It resembles a hieroglyph, the meaning of which can only be deconstructed by recoding a given meaning, since the cultural text conveys aggression and annihilation. The man in jasmine, it, white, as a symbol of desire, is the desire of a female subject: itself, it is without body and sex, paralyzed and absent. It is the desire of a wish machine, one that is not allowed to wish itself. In order to understand why the voice of a woman speaks to us in polyphonous texts, we must know that she has no other choice than to speak. How can she speak of herself with letters, ones that were created to speak of something else, of the male?
How can the net, the text-net, that holds her captive, that surrounds her, at the same time help close the void she is trying to flee? How can the oppressed express his/her difference and opposition in the language of the oppressor? Is this only possible by subversively recoding the code itself -something that only works when the subject becomes language itself, as is the case of the anagrammatic body. The "semiotic game of dice" (Julia Kristeva) and the "Jeux a deux" (Unica Zürn), the games of language and life, the strategies of the subject in a text and in the body, generate each other. As an insurrection in language they do not open up a new territory of reality. The texts our culture has brought forth show that a woman can only express her ego in letters, but even here it is distorted. Her fate is the igitur of the semiotic game of dice of a phallocentric culture. The vowel representing the woman does not exist in this culture. The vagina is the lost, mutilated vowel in the alphabet of our culture.
The alphabet of the body shows this, where woman have presented their artistic productions. But also modern myths, such as the B-pictures of the 20th century, articulate the unconscious social text. The woman is only a mummy in our culture, one that acts as if it were alive. Horror films and novels, male phantasms, show the male's fear of the hate and revenge of the woman mummified by him, the creature without organs. This, and the disturbances of gait and the disequilibrium of an anagrammatic body constitute the unconscious social text of mummy films. The woman in our culture is a creature without organs – or nothing but an organ.
She is only a tongue like Linda Lovelace, she is only a sulking mouth, yearning for the phallus, she is only breast or only heart, only soul, or only (birth-giving) mother. As a creature without organs (the snake) or a creature consisting only of organs (the spider), the woman is a machine of male reproduction and endless lust. The social identity of the woman consists of alternating masks. This explains the woman's obsession with finding her true face, with the beauty of her face, her faith in the value of the face. "The total sum of all faces with which I have lived, has appeared. This face exists! Finally I have seen it and fully corresponds to the search for the face in the body. The woman's lack of meaning and face in the phallic cultural body generates the restive transformations, the accelerated fluctuations of larvae, masks and mummies. She seeks to check them and to obtain a face as a defense. So that hers will not be Unica Zürn's fate: "After 43 years of life, my life has not become 'my life'. It could just as well be someone else's life." The unlived life is not just the fate of children of the Victorian woman, but of the woman herself (see for example, the biography of Thomas Mann's wife). Paralyzed by the male, voiceless, gagged by the phallus, the woman, in our culture, lives in the father's silence. In this silent world, polyphonous "voices", by necessity, make themselves heard, coming from an inner space. This polyphonous alphabet of the female body becomes audible in the circular movement of the five women presented here. Unica Zürn: The drama of the phallic tongue, a woman lost in the labyrinth of love. Mae West: The seduction of the phallic mother, the verses of the vamp, the anal breast. Mary W. Shelley: The letters of the stomach, the machinery of the mother-mummy. Lady Ada Lovelace: The brain machine, the bound head, the erotic rhythms of computation, the body and the number. Linda Lovelace: The letters of lust, the throat of the clitoris, the omnipotent oral phantasies. From the tongue as phallus (Unica Zürn) to the phallus as tongue (Linda Lovelace): the circle is complete when, in the unconscious social text, the woman's body represents nothing but a man's prick.
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