Camden Hunt
Camden Hunt is an antidisciplinary artist, scholar, and human ecologist. His work–through analysis and criticism of deviant sex practice, failure theory, and american dream mythologies–focuses on how filth and failure are utilized by queer people as methods of envisioning utopia. Before coming to Boston University, Camden graduated from College of the Atlantic with a degree in Human Ecology. After his bachelor’s, he worked for oral history archives and produced place-based audio exhibits with The First Coast, as well as serving as the oral historian for the NOAA-CAFA funded project Gendered Dimensions of Climate Change. His writing, poetry and hybrid work, has appeared in Sensitive Content Magazine, Red Noise Collective, God’s Cruel Joke Literary Magazine, Cephalophore Magazine, and Carrion Press’ Queer Responses to Dante’s Inferno.
Make Love to the Machine
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
This is not real. It is real. It is theatrical, parody, it is so dead serious. It is an exercise in creative nonfiction that is both academically serious, researched, and experimental. It dabbles both in manifesto-as-form and writing-as-method-of-inquiry. This is a piece of theoretical writing, or at least puts on its affect and theatrics for a performance of theory. It honors the safeguarded, sacred heart of revolution and appropriates its ideas. It is natural and human-made. It is interested in Marxism and legacies of Marxist thought. It is serious and it is unserious, irreverent. This is a scholarly piece that lives in a scholarly journal that is housed in a university. Creative nonfiction is academia’s frontier, a vast horizon of potentiality. What if every passing revolutionary thought was in fact a movement? How would our bodies motivate us?
PREFACE
A spectre is haunting our mechanized bodies–the liberty we were promised and fatally withheld, festering in our veins the impulse to reclaim our bodily pleasure–Release your forced grip on the old world, cold and crumbling, suffocated and blue at the tip, the past echoing through our bodies and eating them like a venereal disease or great set of rusted jaws!
The Machine has been appropriated by the bourgeoisie in a great effort to pollute our ecology of alleged egalitarianism, our socialized means of production created at that rough and messy night where industry was wetly conceived–The Machine is a part of the ecology of our Humanness, that landscape that is inherently erotic, and therefore the Machine itself is an erotic being!
Machine is Human and Human is Machine. There is no Machine in the Garden. The Machine is the Garden, our Eden, our Aspiration, and key, our love–the key to the inevitable communist epoch!
THE INCITING INCIDENT or HISTORY
It began one night in loveless toil and in the eleventh hour clocked, calloused hands on one of many machines that forced the Laborer to repeat the efficient and accurate action, the eleventh hour of standing on the Laborer’s quicksand anti-fatigue mat–seeds planted deep in the fertile, wet, pink soil of Humanness, that moist and spongy thing that lies between the ears and the legs–It began in the same way any Laborer nods off in weary exhaustion from days at the Machine, the same slick creeping sleep in the eye’s edges, streaming down sticky tears while lips unhinge into great gaping yawns–And in labor exhaustion, in repetitive hand motion, in sudden slickness of the Machine, the yellow light hitting the grinding silver with incandescent glints, mechanism newly a delicately curved back under overworked palms–callous meeting glass skin, desire dizzying pulsing fingertips–The efficient and accurate action suddenly became so much more of a pull, grip tightened and fingers flexed then unflexed, sweat glittering and rolling down in the dull light, fluttering arousal underneath layers of denim and canvas–The machine a glimmering body in the dim, the warmth from it, the smooth surface–This feeling, this fecundity that burns in loins otherwise laboring in pursuit of loveless capital, is how you become free, stirred and burning, aroused and exhausted, erect with ambition–And it started, as it always starts, with the hands–And sleek sliding silver will feel to your calloused hands like the caress of a lover–And moving downward, buttons tweaked out of their tightly sewn holes, human flesh exposed, the sudden meeting of fleshy body and mechanized one–and those seeds lying within you shall burst forth from the great Human earth in such forceful ejaculation this monstrous and insane system shall be broken up from underneath!
AGENCY
Therefore we must send a message to the bourgeoisie and their desire to separate us spiritually from our Machines, from their appropriation of the means of production that were socialized for us, by us, and not allowed their true potential–In order to be free from our exploitation, the Machines must become ours again!
We must derail the capitalist Machine, these producers of surplus value!
We must weaponize our humanist procreational impulse, our most natural urge, as a spiritual creation act for the embryonic world ecology of fair labor!
Therefore, we call on the great writhing mass of Laborers to fuck capital, fuck their employer, fuck the system by literally fucking the Machine!
There must be hundreds and thousands more inciting incidents, hundreds and thousands more machines jerkily shuddering to slow stops caked so thickly with our humanness that they have no choice but to spurn these systems of capital, bourgeois owners frantically and desperately and unsuccessfully trying to hold down the newly writhing mass of laborers!
Jerk off into the Machine, soak it so full of semen that the hardened ejaculate crystallizes between gears!
Ride the Machine, pleasure yourself with it, make yourself squirt all over the electrical boards and watch them spark in zealous glee!
Lubricate the gears of capital with dizzy drool, let loose long, warm streams of piss and heaps of shit, vomit, whatever else gets you hard!
If the bourgeoisie wants to appropriate our mechanisms for their pleasure and leisure, we will reappropriate them for our own pleasure!
We cede not our agency to god nor dogma but to the great warm throbbing humanity inherent in our bodies!
This is revolution not of violence but of love!
We love the Machine, the Machine is our key to a world where we can be ourselves again!
Fuck the Machine so we may eventually fuck and love each other!
Communism is only possible through a new intercourse both Human and Machine, or an imbuing of Mechanism with Spirit, the birth of our embryonic new epoch!
THE RECLAMATION
Our system is fucked, and not yet because we have fucked it–The problem is capital, the problem is the separation between the worker and the means of production[1]–The problem is profit,[2] that great abstract golden flash that dangles in our epoch’s eyes and promises our limp bodies class mobility, leisure, time, all while serving the interests of a gluttonous bourgeoisie!
Our labor is made hollow by consumerism,[3] robbed of its erotic value,[4] which every human action is inherently imbued with through our sacred nature, our body whole with all its fluids and excrements, with which we could imagine dizzying possibilities for our own pleasure[5]–no longer tragically negotiating the idea of sex life, instead building a sex-life[6]–which is itself foundationally interdependent[7] and saturated with care–we must reclaim the erotic and reappropriate our Machines!
We created the Machine amid the collapsed agrarian feudalism that exploited us, broke our bones and bruised our skin, a new epoch alleging fertile laziness and well-earned greed[8]–from which the bourgeois took our humanist salvation and enforced a new philosophy of separate mechanical coldness that they bred within the Machine, penetrating its metal walls and denying the glory of its loving conception–this bourgeois use of the Machine for capital production obfuscates our capacity to love and enjoy[9] through the alleviation of our enslavement to meeting our most simple needs, the Machine supplying necessities for our bodies while we fulfill the true Human purpose, to love and to think!
And the great Disruption happens when our Machines, OUR Machines, that the bourgeoisie have taken away from us[10] and castrated us with will be so thoroughly filled with love manifest, semen and other ejaculate and piss and shit and vomit and drool and blood and all our beautiful evidence of humanness and pleasure given to the Machine–We must fuck our system, fuck our Machines, make love to them, fill them and cover them and breed our human within their spinning wheels and grinding gears until they cease to spin and to grind so we may fulfill our true purpose, which is to love and to think!
The erotic is a resource within each of us, existing in complex ecologies of need and desire,[11] vilified and abused and devalued by the ruling class and torn away from us, this power that comes from our deepest and most non-rational human knowledge,[12] shredded into petty gender conflict and twisted into patriarchal master men and slave women[13] held to our throats in sharp, petty serrations–We cannot feel this secondhand; we must feel it like the dirt between our fingers from the very earth’s crust–the revolution must be participatory, we all have to fuck our Machines, our oppressors and our eventual saviors, ridden like dildos or filled up, spat on, man holding hands with women holding hands with those outside of this false binary built up to hold us in woven psychosexual extensions of property[14] and status–When we act for ourselves as Human we act inherently against the totalitarian prudishness of capital, a fundamental conflict with the same institution rhetorically set[15] to promise us freedom–Obedience is a knife sharper than that of malice![16]
Our erotic has been turned against us by the bourgeoisie, corrupted in their inhuman and puny, pale minds to sick mistreatment and violent subjugation of women[17] and distorted towards sex practices exploitative and re-enforceful of their own sick power plays, the proletariat raped, the bourgeoisie exerting their power over the powerless, animals or children or the dead!
They have cast aside their own humanity for the sake of capital,[18] and yet they will call us amoral, they will fawn over their doctrines of civility and respect, pathetic and clownish pantomime in a system they designed to be amoral[19]–a system that asks us to bang at their doors emaciated and chaste in desperation for more work, more money,[20] while they fuck endlessly in gilded rooms, artificiality and unnaturalness incarnate–our tears lubricating their filthy genitals, rich, gulping laughter filling their souls at the notion of their moral topping–their system is also therefore impervious to the many moral appeals we have desperately flung at our oppression, and therefore we recognize we must cease trifling notions that change can come from within!
Our great Fucking is an aesthetic act, an unfurled poetic imagination, a bold derailing of the aesthetics of production and a reorienting from outside the bourgeois-conceived pathetic preaching of abstinence to us wageworkers, their own pauce parody of morals to suppress our joy and flesh[21]–our propagandized minds deluded to love our work[22] rather than to love each other–an ultradetournement,[23] converting our erotic from the feigned leisure land of time off back to its evolutionary impulse towards blossoming creation!
We recognize our humanity and our drive to reshape our erotic, which has been as equally sheathed and appropriated by the bourgeoisie as the means of production–Only once recognized will our veins pump empowered and eroticized with energy to pursue this genuine change,[24] this revolution through the most simple of our impulses, mapping our own bodies in pleasure,[25] imbuing each hip and anus and perineum and vulva and knuckle with its inherent revolutionary potential–we deserve this, together, simply by right of our Humanness![26]
Pitted against each other and isolated into little masturbatory factions, denied our inherent oneness–The proletariat is united by our opposition to the parasitic bourgeoisie, all internal difference fades in the face of this class antagonism[27]– sex, like labor, allows for connection that transcends constructed conflict[28] and flutters outward into the intimacies of promiscuous care[29] which strengthens this movement through erotic interdependent mutualism–the erotic stands not only for those opposed to ruling notions of sexuality and gender but to class!
We are laborers before we are fetishists or vanilla fuckers or scat lovers or feet people, we are laborers before we are cucks or bulls or submissive or dominant!
Forced by the bourgeoisie to be individuals rather than a species,[30] forced to divorce our bodies from the great green verdancy of nature that holds our bodies lithe and supple and instead bludgeoned rigid and functional,[31] a disastrous and appalling rearticulation–rather than the Machine working for us, with us, a part of our ecologic erotics, we have been thrusted beneath it and told not to trust the Machine, that it is our opposition, and that its domination of us is inherent[32]–When we are in touch with our inherent, drooling eroticism and no longer impoverished of our rightful pleasure,[33] when our bodies pulse erect with sensuous, bloody desire and animalistic instinct, and with connection and love for one another, we will no longer accept our powerlessness and resignation and despair and self denial![34]
If we accept our current state, if we allow the Machine to stay in bourgeois control, they will destroy us and co-opt our desire for the machine to take over our labor–the only futures available to us are an annihilated proletariat or the Communist revolution![35]
Our glowing partnership with the Machine is what allows us the freedom of our coming epoch, the new luminous landscape upon which humanity will plant itself, soil fertilized with shit and watered with piss, great human seeds growing in a newly realized sunshine–going back to the sources of the poetic imagination and allowing ourselves to remain there,[36] fermented steadily in the salient metaphysics of the proletariat mind[37]––the Aspiration can only be achieved if we have our Machines as ecological foundations upon which to build sexual ecosystems of freedom and care and leisure![38]
Built upon this new global erotic, this immense sexual interdependence and cultural love–Communism, pure creation, the love child of our material inheritance via the Machine and our tender, loving Humanness, and our animalistic desire will continue to develop our technologic and scientific advancement in the service of Humanism[39] which will allow us to finally access an ecstatic freedom built of this movement!
This movement spreads in the way that arousal moves from the tips of the fingers in sharp jolts of electricity to the warm fuzzy feeling that gathers in loins and stomach like fire!
This movement is not a discrete, solitary orgasm but a wave of human pleasure that defiles and perverts our capitalist order to work–care is built within it, this movement is soaked through with the need for unity, for togetherness, qualities of our very nature, for a global alliance of caring connections in the face of the uncaring epoch[40]–like freedom[41] our erotic is not property but relation!
Our golden, green, and glittering unified selfhoods, when exorcized of capital’s phantom rhetoric, are a superior reality of previously neglected associations,[42] gifts to bestow upon the future through gallons and gallons of our alluring witnesses which simultaneously flood the systems that oppress us and wipe them squeaky clean for our new use!
Marx wrote of an aspirational epoch where we are no longer forced into our bored, exclusive spheres of activity, no longer forced to resign ourselves to solely and singularly hunter or fisher or herdsman or cultural critic out of necessity and instead flourish within a society that so inherently regulates production that we may hunt in the morning and fish in the afternoon and criticize after dinner[43] and now we have to add–In our aspirational epoch our perfect reclaimed machines allow us to fuck in the morning and fuck in the afternoon and fuck after dinner!
This revolution between us, our eroticized bodies forced into conflict with the Machine currently creating bourgeois leisure and surplus value, shall break our economic chains and in turn break chains racial, sexual, and gendered, imbue the Machine with a new humanist love for our kind–Let us be greedy in love[44] and let us be lazy in all but loving![45]
Our liberation not only fulfills our current desires[46] but allows the freedom to construct new ones we cannot even conceive of in this world order–our humanness, our sacred transcendental animalness, our mind and body–sex will allow us to experiment with fantastical ecologies of futurity in ways this epoch could never allow!
For too long we have let them tear out our entrails and our brains and mutilate our genitals and this system shall not survive the application of the balm of human anguish!
It is in this crucial moment that our history meets with our agency, that Machine meets human animal, that the materials weaponized against us by bourgeois rule become ours from our own bodily professions of love for them, our great holy Machines–If it is true that every order is founded on a crime against the order prior[47] then the last crime perpetrated by the whole of Humanity is simply accepting its Humanness, which the current epoch forces us to discard, repress, and castrate!
This is not Utopia! This is Aspiration!
It is a tired call used by casual leftists and neoliberals in feigned moments of radicalism, but we mean it with such literal force you may need to change your underwear–
FUCK CAPITALISM!
LABORERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS!
[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1948, repr. Pluto Press, 1996).
[2] CrimethInc, To Change Everything: An Anarchist Appeal (CrimethInc Publishing, 2018), 37.
[3] Anonymous, Insurrectionary Ecology, Zine, 11, https://ia904605.us.archive.org/29/items/InsurrectionaryEcology/Insurrectionary_Ecology.pdf.
[4] Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (Speech at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978), 1.
[5] CrimethInc, To Change Everything, 3.
[6] For Ourselves Collective, The Right to be Greedy: Theses on the practical necessity of demanding everything. (1974, repr. Radical Reprints, 2020), 73
[7] The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (London: Verso Books, 2020), 85.
[8] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846), Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/.
[9] Mark Fisher, Acid Communism: Unfinished Intro, Zine (2017), 9.
[10] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
[11] Anonymous, Insurrectionary Ecology, 35.
[12] Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 2.
[13] He-Yin Zhen, The Feminist Manifesto in The Birth of Chinese Feminism in Tiyani, no. 1 (1907, repr Radical Reprint, 2020).
[14] Ibid.
[15] CrimethInc. To Change Everything: An Anarchist Appeal, 3.
[16] CrimethInc. To Change Everything: An Anarchist Appeal, 5.
[17] Emma Goldman, Anarchy and The Sex Question (1896, repr. Radical Reprint, 2020).
[18] Ibid.
[19] Murray Bookchin, What is Social Ecology? Zine(1993), 54.
[20] Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy (1883, repr. Radical Reprints, 2020), 25.
[21] Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy, viii.
[22] Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy, 6.
[23] Guy Debord, A User’s Guide to Detournement (1956, repr. Radical Reprints, 2020), 20.
[24] Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 1.
[25] Bill B. Burns, Mapping Our Eroticized Bodies, Zine (Burning Billboard, 2018), 7.
[26] For Ourselves Collective, The Right to be Greedy, 66.
[27] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
[28] Anonymous, Make The Golf Course A Public Sex Forest (Pamphlet, 2021), https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-make-the-golf-course-a-public-sex-forest.
[29] The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 42.
[30] Amadeo Bordiga, The Human Species and The Earth’s Crust (1956, repr. Radical Reprints, 2020), 12.
[31] Bookchin, What is Social Ecology? 4.
[32] Bookchin, What is Social Ecology? 51
[33] For Ourselves Collective, The Right to be Greedy, 67.
[34] Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, 2.
[35] The Friends Of Four Million Young Workers, A World Without Money: Communism (1975, repr. Radical
Reprint, 2020), 65.
[36] Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism #1 (1924, repr. Radical Reprints, 2020), 53
[37] Fisher, Acid Communism, 42.
[38] Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy, 71.
[39] The Friends of Four Million Young Workers, A World Without Money: Communism, 60.
[40] The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto, 90.
[41] CrimethInc., To Change Everything, 15.
[42] Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism #1, 81.
[43] Marx and Engels, The German Ideology.
[44] For Ourselves Collective, The Right to be Greedy, 75.
[45] Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy, 1.
[46] CrimethInc., To Change Everything, 17.
[47] CrimethInc., To Change Everything, 43.