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Second ± since it is solely about the Erlebnis, the subjectively livedthrough sensations, Ætness cannot be intersubjectively compared nor objectively measured; it can hardly even be reported in interpersonally meaningful terms and so confronted with other subjects' experience. Much as counsel is needed to make up for that immanent un-graspability of evidence, there is possibly an ultimate limit to the counsellors' intervention; name-giving and quotations of statistical averages will stop short of breaking open the loneliness of the sensation-seeker. As we know from Ludwig Wittgenstein, there is no such thing as private language, but one would need nothing less than a private language to express sensations ± that most thoroughly and uncompromisingly private ingredient of the Lebenswelt. This is, indeed, a Catch 22 ± demanding no less than the squaring of a circle.
One way or the other, since certainty can be only an interpersonal, social achievement, the Ætness-seekers can never be sure how far they got and how far they still need to go. Third ± in the game called Ætness, the player is simultaneously the Æddle and the Æddler. It is the bodily pleasurable, exciting or thrilling sensations which a Æt person seeks ± but the sensations-collector is that body and, at the same time, that body's owner, guardian, trainer and director. The two roles are inherently incompatible. The Ærst requires total immersion and self-abandonment, the second calls for a distance and sober judgement. Reconciliation of the two demands is a tall order ± if attainable at all, which is doubtful. Added to the two previously signalled troubles, that additional worry makes the plight of the Ætness-seeker an agony of which our health-conscious ancestors had no inkling. All three troubles daily generate a great deal of anxiety; what is more, however, that anxiety ± the speciÆcally postmodern afØiction ± is unlikely ever to be cured and stopped. It is also diffuse, as Jean Baudrillard pointed out; and diffuse, unfocused anxieties admit no speciÆc remedies. . . .
Sexual delight is arguably the topmost of pleasurable sensations; indeed, a pattern by which all other pleasures tend to be measured and of which they are, by common consent, but pale reØections at best, inferior or counterfeit imitations at worst. Whatever has been said above about the sensation-gathering life strategy in general, applies in a magniÆed measure to the speciÆcally postmodern rendition of eroticism, that `cultural processing' of sex. All the contradictions inherent to the life of a sensationcollector in general hit sexual life with concentrated power ± but there is an extra difÆculty arising from the inborn monotonous inØexibility of sex (sex, let us remember, being a phenomenon of nature and not of culture, leaves little room for the inventiveness typical of culture). In its postmodern rendition, sexual activity is focused narrowly on its orgasmic effect; for all practical intents and purposes, postmodern sex is about orgasm. Its paramount task is to supply ever stronger, inÆnitely variable, preferably novel and unprecedented Erlebnisse; little can be done however in this Æeld and so the ultimate sexual experience remains forever a task ahead and no actual sexual experience is truly satisfying, none makes further training, instruction, counsel, recipe, drug or gadget unnecessary.
Bauman ± On Postmodern Uses of Sex 25
There is another aspect of the relation between the present-day erotic revolution and the wider postmodern cultural transformations which I wish now to bring to your attention.
Sex, as we know, is nature's evolutionary solution to the issue of continuity, durability of life forms; it sets mortality of every individual living organism against immortality of the species. Only humans know that this is the case; only humans know that they are bound to die, and only humans may imagine the perpetuity of humankind; only for them does the transient existence of the body run its course in the shadow of the perpetuity of humanity as a whole. Such knowledge has tremendous consequences; it is by no means fanciful to suppose that it lies behind the notorious dynamics of human cultural inventions which all, as a rule, are contraptions meant to render the duration of social forms immune to the transience and inborn perishability of human individual lives; or, rather, the ingenious workshops where durability is continually produced out of the transient ± where the fragile, time-bound existence of human bodies is reforged into the solid perpetuity of humanity.
Sex lies at the heart of that alchemy. Sex is the material substratum of that cultural production of immortality and the pattern or supreme metaphor for the effort to transcend individual mortality and stretch human existence beyond the life-span of individual humans. Sex is involved ± centrally and inextricably ± in the greatest feat and the most awe-inspiring of cultural miracles: that of conjuring up immortality out of mortality, the interminable out of the temporal, the imperishable out of the evanescent. The enigma of that logic-defying miracle, that mind-boggling puzzle of the most vulnerable and abstruse accomplishment of culture saturates every sexual act: the communion of two mortal beings is lived through as the birth of immortality. . . . With the advent of human awareness of mortality sex loses its innocence irretrievably.
Located on the other side of eroticism, love is the emotional/intellectual superstructure which culture built upon the sexual differences and their sexual reunion, thereby investing sex with rich and inÆnitely expandable meaning which protects and reinforces its power to recast mortality into immortality. Love is a cultural replica or a reÆned likeness of that overcoming of the opposition between the transience of sexual bodies and the durability of their reproduction, which is matter-of-factly accomplished in the sexual act. Like sex itself, love is therefore burdened with ambiguity, residing as it does on the thin line dividing the natural from the supernatural, the familiar present and the enigmatic, impenetrable future. Love of another mortal person is one of the principal cultural ventures into immortality; it is, we may say, a spiritual mirror held to the sexually created biological eternity. Like sex, love is a source of incurable anxiety, though perhaps an anxiety deeper still for being soaked through with the premonition of failure. In love, the hope and the promise of `eternal love' is invested here in the body which is anything but eternal; the eternity of love and of the beloved is culture's saving lie, helping to assimilate what in fact deÆes
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comprehension. A mortal person is loved as if he or she were immortal, and is loved by a mortal person in a way accessible only to eternal beings.
We have noted before that a most prominent mark of the postmodern erotic revolution is cutting the ties connecting eroticism on one side to sex (in its essential reproductive function) and on the other to love. Precautions are taken in the postmodern culture to secure the emancipation of erotically inspired activity from the constraints imposed biologically by the reproductive potential of sex and culturally by love's demands of eternal and strictly selective, in fact exclusive, loyalty. Eroticism has thereby been set free of both links tying it to the production of immortality, physical or spiritual. But in this spectacular liberation it was not alone; it followed the much more universal trends which affect in equal measure arts, politics, life strategies and virtually every other area of culture.
It is a general feature of postmodern condition that it Øattens time and condenses the perception of the inÆnitely expendable Øow of time into the experience (Erlebnis) of Jetztzeit, or slices it into a series of self-sustained episodes, each to be lived through as an intense experience of the Øeeting moment and cut off as thoroughly as possible from both its past and its future consequences. Politics of movements is being replaced with the politics of campaigns, aimed at instant results and unconcerned with their long-term repercussions; concern with lasting (everlasting!) fame gives way to the desire for notoriety; historical duration is identiÆed with instant (and in principle effaceable) recording; works of art, once meant to last `beyond the grave', are replaced with deliberately short-lived happenings and onceoff installations; identities of a kind meant to be built diligently and to last for life's duration are exchanged for identity kits Æt for immediate assembly and equally instant dismantling. The new postmodern version of immortality is meant to be lived instantly and enjoyed here and now; no longer it is a hostage to the merciless and uncontrollable Øow of objective time.
The postmodern `deconstruction of immortality' ± the tendency to cut off the present from both past and future ± is paralleled by tearing eroticism apart from both sexual reproduction and love. This offers erotic imagination and practice, like the rest of postmodern life-politics, a freedom of experimentation which they never enjoyed before. Postmodern eroticism is freeØoating; it can enter chemical reaction with virtually any other substance, feed and draw juices from any other human emotion or activity. It has become an unattached signiÆer capable of being wedded semiotically to virtually unlimited numbers of signiÆeds, but also a signiÆed ready to be represented by any of the available signiÆers. Only in such a liberated and detached version may eroticism sail freely under the banner of pleasureseeking, undaunted and undiverted from its pursuits by any other than aesthetic, that is Erlebnis-oriented, concerns. It is free now to establish and negotiate its own rules as it goes, but this freedom is its fate which eroticism can neither change nor ignore. The void created by the absence of external constraints, by the retreat or neutral disinterestedness of legislating powers, must be Ælled or at least an attempt must be made to Æll it. The newly
Bauman ± On Postmodern Uses of Sex 27
acquired underdetermination is the basis of an exhilaratingly vast freedom but also the cause of extreme uncertainty and anxiety. No authoritative solutions to go by, everything to be negotiated anew and ad hoc. . . .
Eroticism, in other words, has become a sort of a Jack-of-all-trades desperately seeking a secure abode and steady job yet fearing the prospect of Ænding them. . . . This circumstance makes it available for new kinds of social uses, sharply different from the ones known from most of modern history. Two in particular need to be brieØy discussed here.
The Ærst is the deployment of eroticism in the postmodern construction of identity. The second is the role played by eroticism in servicing the network of interpersonal bonds on the one hand, the separatist battles of individualization on the other.
Identity ceased to be the `given', the product of the `Divine chain of being', and became instead a `problem' and an individual task with the dawn of modern times. In this respect there is no difference between the `classic' modernity and its postmodern phase. What is new is the nature of the problem and the way the resulting tasks are tackled. In its classic modern form, the problem of identity consisted, for most men and women, in the need to acquire their social deÆnitions, to build them using their own efforts and resources, out of performances and appropriations, rather than inherited properties. The task was to be approached through setting a target ± a model of identity desired ± and then doggedly sticking throughout one's life to the itinerary determined by the target set. At the sunset of the classic era of modernity, Jean-Paul Sartre summed up that time-honoured experience in his concept of the `life project', which does not so much express as create the `essence' of the human individual. Identities of postmodern men and women remain, like the identities of their ancestors, human-made. But no longer do they need to be meticulously designed, carefully built and rocksolid. Their most coveted virtue is Øexibility: all structures should be light and mobile so that they can be rearranged at short notice, one-way streets should be avoided, no commitment should be strongly binding enough to cramp free movement. Solidity is an anathema as is all permanence ± now the sign of dangerous maladjustment to the rapidly and unpredictably changing world, to the surprise opportunities it holds and the speed with which it transforms yesterday's assets into today's liabilities.
Eroticism cut free from its reproductive and amorous constraints Æts the bill very well; it is as if it were made to measure for the multiple, Øexible, evanescent identities of postmodern men and women. Sex free of reproductive consequences and stubborn, lingering love attachments can be securely enclosed in the frame of an episode, as it will engrave no deep grooves on the constantly re-groomed face being thus insured against limiting the freedom of further experimentation. Free-Øoating eroticism is therefore eminently suitable for the task of tending to the kind of identity which, like all other postmodern cultural products, is (in George Steiner's memorable words) calculated for `maximal impact and instant obsolescence'.
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Free-Øoating eroticism stands as well behind what Anthony Giddens has dubbed `plastic sex'. A hundred years or so ago, when eroticism was tightly wrapped around sexual reproduction, given no right to independent existence and denied having its own telos, men and women were culturally expected and pressed to live up to the fairly precise standards of maleness and feminity, organized around their respective roles in reproductive sex and protected by the requirement of the lasting attachment of partners. That was the era of norm, and the boundary between the normal and the abnormal was clearly drawn and closely guarded. The difference between sex and its `perversion' left little to the imagination. This has not got to be the case, and is not, now ± when but a small parcel of the vast erotic territory is dedicated to the reproductive aspects of sex and the territory as a whole allows for free movement and has but a few long-lease residences. For males and females alike, the way their sexuality is erotically exploited bears no direct relation to their reproductive role and there is no reason why it should be limited to the experience obtainable through the performance of that role. Much richer sensual fruits of sexuality can be harvested through experimenting as well with other than straightforwardly heterosexual activities. As in so many other areas, so too in sexuality the realm once thought to be ruled by nature alone is invaded and colonized by cultural troops; the gender aspect of identity, like all other aspects, is not given once and for all ± it has to be chosen, and may be discarded if it is deemed unsatisfactory or not satisfying enough. This aspect, like all other constituents of postmodern identity, is therefore permanently underdetermined, incomplete, open to change, and so a realm of uncertainty and an inexhaustible source of anxiety and soul-searching, as well as fear that some precious kinds of sensation have been missed and the pleasure-giving potential of the body has not been squeezed to the last drop.
Let me say now a few words about the role assigned to eroticism in the weaving and unstitching of the tissue of interpersonal relations.
In his `Introduction' to The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault (1990: 40±4, 103±7) argued convincingly that in all its manifestations, whether those known since time immemorial or such as have been discovered or named for the Ærst time, sex served the articulation of new ± modern ± mechanisms of power and social control. The medical and educational discourses of the 19th century construed, among other notions, also the phenomenon of infantile sexuality, later to be turned by Freud, ex post facto, into the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. The central role in this articulation was played by the panic contrived around the child's proclivity to masturbate ± perceived simultaneously as a natural inclination and a disease, a vice impossible to uproot and a danger of an incalculably damaging potential. It was the task of parents and teachers to defend children against this danger ± but in order to make the protection effective, it was necessary to spy the afØiction in every change of demeanour, every gesture and facial expression, to order strictly the whole of the children's lives to make the morbid practice impossible. Around the never-ending struggle against the threat of masturbation a whole system was constructed