Lennart Koch

Lately I’ve been sleeping naked. Waking up and pushing aside the blanket, revealing my nude body, gives me crippling dysphoria. For some reason I keep doing it. Perhaps it’s a desire accelerating the inevitability to initiate change. An opportunity for intensities, the jouissance of the repetition of the same, the enjoyment of my own suffering so to say. I want to embrace the validity of dysphoria as an individual emotion without acknowledging it as some sort of mental illness to be treated from or the bs of getting to the root of some fucking symptom. Language will keep mosh-pitting us into the four-cornered space of relations. The masters' tools must be seized to dismantle their house, their magnificent wooden spiral-staircase from which you can gaze through the spotless panoramic window not only at your own reflection, when real close to it, but also right at the neatly stained white picket fence behind the meticulously organized nuclear family dinner happening in the garden.

One morning I decide to take a step and shave off my arm hair. I listen to Scott Walkers “Tilt”. I am shaking. Then, ecstasy. Each hair falling onto my mom's bathroom floor feels like a tiny piece of masculinity being castrated from my body. Does this anxiety represent the fear of becoming something separate for you? What are you so scared of? To be desired without possessing that which you think you are desired for? Why the constant outcry towards the appeal of twoness? Allegedly the “female” can never have, nor can the „male“ ever be the phallus.

My ass!

Castration is in no way tied to losing one's masculinity or becoming more feminine, just as moving away from masculinity does not necessarily mean wanting to move towards femininity, or towards anything in particular, except in this case it does. I ask my mom to pluck my eyebrows, to make my face look softer, I say, but what I actually wanted to say was: more like a girl.

I fantasize about getting fucked into non-existence. Not actually getting fucked but fucked the way the managerial parasite fucks the societal body, produces it by looking real hot and making us crave its seduction, down on our knees begging for more, which makes its worst habit enjoying getting blackout fucked. Fucked the way McKenzie Wark writes in “Reverse Cowgirl”, the skin of the Other sticking onto you, wanting to be wanted as the Other. (the word “fuck” appears about 250 times in the book).

The dissolution of the self, the eviscerating awareness of your physical body and all its cultural burdens vanishing all at once. Watching your own body through the other person; perceiving without being. Spin-drying the alienation of penetration; sublating its exploitive savagery. Which silly little fantasy.

                                                              *
Pearlescent water drops trickle off my silken perfumed skin onto wrinkly sugar-coated towel folds. The amorphous seduction of crisis, about time it’s being managed they say, whilst rolling up their white-collar sleeves, buttoning down their shiny black satin shirt and, now stripped, a real clusterfuck of commerce, of repeated commercial suicide attempts, only prevented in the pathetic last seconds of clinging onto life, holding ever so tightly onto it through ad-blocked paywall spasms and the marketization of internalized kinship, I laugh at my colleagues. Placebo cash flows of recreational sex, auto-erotic stimuli sustained over extended periods of time, which must have some kind of long-term financial advantage or symbolic exchange value equivalent to the patriarchal obsession with the phallus. A prognosis of bliss, hard-fact investments in destabilization extract all resources from these so-called assistants to the now unrecognizable face of disfigurement paid for by MasterCard, suck ‘em dry and leave their rotting corpses behind as this subversive potential unfolds itself, turns inside out and spreads like a disease, or more like a franchise, only for you to realize the inside is in fact the same as the outside, yes, much to your surprise it is and always has been one and the same, 1 and the same, nothing whilst simultaneously everything, needless to say that these boundaries are of no use anymore, the words inside and outside made superfluous, superstructure crumbling under the weight of reverse engineered saliva.

Your feverishly rose-tinted cheeks whisper a mere speculation of mutual interests spoken in bureaucratic umbrella terms, a friendly reminder carefully phrased in corporate buzzword mania converted into a global mother-tongue. Decentralize desire from all bare skin, the insatiable thirst for expansion spreads symbiotically through soft-porn P2P connections onto accumulated heaps of flesh, back to the corporeal, back to the corporal identity disorder these strategists, or I should rather say: analysts, have fixated on, laid their eyes upon, fetishized to the razor-sharp edge of perversion. What we need is a breach of contract, some kind of desperate breakout move from this culture of feedback, to rug pull these fucking performance improvement plans, liquidate all micro-managerial elegies, hijack the corrosive nature of correspondence, seize the means of stimulation, co-opt to the board of surgical stagflation, prohibit prohibition, undress the grayscaled whipsaw of ongoing workforce reductions, dissolve the negligence of reproductive labor, whistle-blow up the sales division tech bros spellbinding their executives into a fucking primordial trance, relive the privatization of prenatal development, embrace tenderness the same way you used to treasure being a symbol in a world of symbols, get all nice and comfy in this still, and maybe eternally undefined terrain; notice your vocal chords now speaking in absence of surplus, without the need for incestuous police worship or fully succumbing to cute little fantasies, which could be called the courtship dance of fascism for all that I know.

Cover them in shrink wrap and dispose my phantom limbs, oh why must I obey to the monochrome pleasure of the Other? Claustrophobic adoration. The death-drive is hooked up to a public hotspot, working in favor of the tradition of male subjectivity. Downstream the margins of diplomatic lust continue calling my name, machines proceed humming their sweet love songs of now decoded intimacy, the market still tends to have a bullish sentiment to it. Has nothing changed at all? I can feel the stones weighing me down, pushing me further from the surface and closer towards the trenches of performative reiteration gently spilling over into the fragility of being a body of multitudes. Sometimes it’s worse to reach the goal than to be confused by your cold peroxide-soaked hands upon my face endorsing some kind of measurable desire, a concrete taxonomy enumerating gelatinous statistics, a history of excesses uttered by whispers of secrecy allow yourself to be undone.

Please just hold me tight and tell me everything will be alright as I come down from my post-melanin sleep deprivation melancholy-shopping mall-non-place-manically refreshing ig-no signal-wired headphones on full volume-blasting this Italian percussionist-thinking about that one angelic Dior Homme Fall/Winter 2006 round cropped blazer jacket, which looks like it has all these tiny little glass mirror tiles attached to it and how cute it would look on me and how Hedi Slimane fetishized androgyny and made it cool for guys to wear women's skinny jeans and tight Rimbaud-core blouses with ruffles on them-soft drink addiction speedrun-self checkout payment-considering if I should try to scan my coke and walk out with the rest of the stuff in my bag but ending up not doing it cause I tell myself I’m already anxious enough-full on dissociation-with slight hints of panic-attack-withdrawal. How I hate this feeling and even though it rarely occurs anymore makes me so conscious of my being, either thinking everyone must be fucking staring at me, thinking I’m tweaking or tending not to think about how others perceive me at all or that I woke up feeling horrible about my genitals and how this dissociating feeling can for these split seconds also be some sort of salvation, I guess, how I feel ashamed to read all this critical theory and admit that this wet consumer-capitalist alienation fever dream side quest invoked a feeling of liberation in me and maybe I am so wrong about all of this.

That’s just the cartoonishly thin red line fiction operates in. Inserting passages here and there, routing and rerouting the nodes of obedience, squishing itself into fragments of glamorized abundance. So don’t worry my dear, my dearest interlocutor, this merciless state of affairs will indeed keep regulating itself, no need to panic. Meaninglessness will sing in piercing falsettos, touching even the most consolidated of demands.