Optical Illusions/ My Pussy/ The Cut

My grandfather loved optical illusions, M. C. Escher in particular. He kept a ready supply of prints to show me when I used to visit as a child, pulling Escher’s Relativity from a drawer for me to study and grinning as if it was a drawing filthier than it was. Leaving school at twelve, his taste for optical illusions only developed after he got a computer with an internet connection. It was after this that, according to my mother, “he began to look up all that stuff and print it off”. The other thing he looked up with some frequency was porn. He would often ask for help because his device had crashed, having maxed out its accumulation of viruses from prurient clickings on pop-up ads. This would come to family knowledge like the fact of his pierced nipple; in awkward glimpses we would collectively shudder and laugh off.

My surprise that the prints weren’t erotic owes to this, and the fact that throughout my childhood and attempted socialisation as a boy, older men were always showing me filthy drawings. When not intentionally shown, I would discover them secreted away in drawers, cupboards, under beds, once in an entire cache of images my uncle bluetoothed to my phone when he intended to send just one. My dad had a Dictionary of Sex that listed activities and body parts, complete with exaggerated illustrations of dicks falling past a knee into a boot or people in snorkels physically diving into an enormous pussy. The cover was a frisky ball of entwined dicks, arms, elbows, feet and breasts, with no identifying faces showing at all. I think I left it out after showing my friend and it was discovered by a tradie who was at our house, much to my father’s embarrassment. So I understood that viewing these things was supposed to be a secret, and that the machinations of sexual excitement were as forbidden as they were deeply abstract: literally assemblages of anachronistic body parts. In high school I remember a classmate asked me if I’d ever had the horrifying experience of watching a girl get fucked in a porno and right at the moment of orgasm have an enormous dick unexpectedly interrupt the optic? I couldn’t relate, but the earnest question and strange inadvertent halfconfession speaks to memories of being shown a sexual image by someone else and feeling them study my face to see whether I was into it, whether I saw what they saw too.

The relation between desire for the singular part vs. desire for the body as a whole plays out in formulations that essentialise bodies according to their genitalia, where a man becomes “Vitamin D”, or someone can be “up to their ears in pussy”. Expressions like these have their own images that metabolise the body according to a supposed essence, and in the isolation of parts have a specific relation to cutting or collage that renders the body as a sort of optical illusion in and of itself. I think of Irigaray’s cunty poetics where parts of the same body are “always touching”; or people telling me several times that they “can’t imagine” me without a pussy, or that they can imagine what it would/could/does look like; the woman-beloved’s “face always still to be formed”, etc.¹ The possibility of genital difference can only cast aspersions on an essential illusion: how one part relates to another is a well-wrought path of assumption, and confusion results when these parts do not correlate in that same way. We also might consider cutting in literal relation to castration, the rendering of slits, and the shaky preconscious optics of appraisal surrounding that difference. How do erotics bleed into optics through the predetermination of the cut?

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The possibility of the erotic look becoming an optical illusion has strong significance in psychoanalysis, which is of course centrally organised around castration. Freud had a notion that because the eyes and mouth were important in daily functioning like eating and making judgements, and also had a central role to play in sexual pleasure, there must be an uncomfortable jostling for the ego to regain control over them. It is for this reason that vision might be altered or sabotaged in cases of pathology, for example, as egoic retaliation against viewing images that were sexually explicit:

If we find that an organ normally serving the purpose of sense-perception begins to behave like an actual genital when its erotogenic role is increased, we shall not regard it as improbable that toxic changes are also occurring in it.²

The alteration of the vision is aligned with castration, an hysteria of vision, giving weird credence to myths and sayings that “masturbation makes you go blind” or the same happening to (Freud’s example) Lady Godiva’s Peeping Tom.

Freud’s teacher Jean-Martin Charcot was the first to develop the diagnosis of hysterical looking. The so-called father of neurology, he ran the largest hospital-cum-prison for women in Paris towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Salpêtrière. Charcot recorded the “scintillating scotoma” (from the Greek skotos meaning “groove” or “cut”), which would cloud the eyes of female hysterics in an éblouissement de ténebres, a “dazzle of shadow”. He also conducted public demonstrations of his charges, hypnotising them in front of an audience to perform convulsions, enact sexual solicitations, give murderous threats, or show the whites of their eyes on cue. The highly sexualised demonstrations became ways in which women’s bodies could be exhibited while maintaining a scientific pretext, cleaving a divide between the hysterics and the rational viewing subject.

The optics surrounding Charcot’s work is parodied in Octave Mirbeau’s contemporaneous, stomach-turning novel Le Jardin Des Supplices, aka The Torture Garden (1899), which explicates the continuum between optical illusion and erotics through cutting. It follows Clara, a violence-crazed Englishwoman who visits a fictionalised Chinese garden complex that doubles as an arena for capital punishment. The juxtaposition between rare plants and tortured prisoners becomes sickeningly harmonious, stressing an analogy between horticulture and torture: both reshape the bodies of living things through cutting. On first entering the garden, the narrator experiences something like the symptoms of scotoma:

I gazed, dazzled; dazzled … even by the great blue shadows that the trees laid softly upon the grass … a sprinkler sprayed water in which all the colours of the rainbow played, and through which the grass and flowers took on the translucence of precious stones.³

This scene gives way to an appraisal of torture victims who themselves are instances of optical illusion: vivisected and hung out to display, their skin cut into strips or their genitals wrenched open and rubbed with peppers. They are aligned with the surrounding “obscene orchids”, some of which resemble “human organs”.⁴ Hence the disconnect between seeing and believing turns around not only grotesque facts of form, but also the display of such “curiosities”. The dynamic is twisted further in Clara’s sexual exaltation: cheeks flushing, mouth open, nipples stiffening beneath the silk of her dress, she cries out in hysterical pleasure at the various spectacles to be had.

The colonial context of the novel links it with the “human zoos” that displayed invaded and enslaved peoples that would reach a horrifying zenith in the worst days of European colonialism, often focusing on “extreme” body parts, such as arses.⁵ The novel explicitly engages these themes as a political response to the Dreyfus affair, a contemporaneous political scandal in France following the public discovery that a Jewish artillery officer was convicted for treason using false documents forged by government officials. This fomented a crisis in faith in the political establishment and the state “machine”, as inflected by anti-Semitism and France’s ongoing colonial entanglements—Alfred Dreyfus being imprisoned in a colonial prison island in Guiana. And so the machinated violence of human horticulture specularises the resurgence of racist iconography in the anti-Dreyfus newspapers of the period, one of which ran a series called the Musée des Horreurs, displaying Jewish public figures with the bodies of apes, serpents and farm animals. The novel thus emphasizes what Emily Apter has called the “pornographic cast” of voyeuristic racism,⁶ its critique embedded in a sort of literary gaslighting that aestheticises structural horror:

If in the private world of the self the punishments for [scopophilic looking] imposed by the ego assumed a form of hysteria, in the public realm they signalled a crisis of judgement, an imbalance in the careful treaty made by civilisation between sexual drives and their institutional sublimation.⁷

So it is the accusation of European barbarism that is reflected in the Chinese garden, with one prisoner’s crime named as “stealing rice from the English”. We also learn the unnamed narrator is in China to escape charges of embezzlement, under the pretext of being a comparative embryologist. His mission to search coral reefs for the “primordial cell of organised life”, was only just chosen over observing the English penitentiary administrations in Tasmania and Fiji. So the visual conflation of horticulture and torture practices gives way to a larger critique of the pursuits of European society in general: its carceral practices being indistinguishable from its natural sciences.

But whether this critique is effective is another matter: the novel maintains the compelling quality of its violent optics through the eroticised vicariousness of Clara. Such multilayered voyeurism reaches its apex after Clara’s visit has ended, and she processes the dazzling horrors of the garden in a visually spectacular hysterical fit. Her body goes into a “rainbow posture”, strenuously arching into the air between her feet and neck. This movement is characteristic of the clownisme that Charcot observed in hysterics at the apex of their episodes, their gestures becoming larger like those of trained acrobats as their bodies became distorted at the limit of physical duress. This change in Clara is accompanied by what reads as an ocular scotoma: her eyes are “half-closed, twitching”, only the whites on display.⁸ Visually castrated, she appears to purge the grotesqueries of the garden that formerly elicited such excitement. Coming down from her corporeal rainbow, the hypersaturated garden has given way to her exhausted profession: “I’m all white… all white… like an anemone!”⁹ She too has become a flower, or else the narrator’s coral reef cell, weirdly anticipating the reef bleaching that will be an eventual outcome of white colonial violence. As Clara is revealed as constitutive of the garden, a privileged and eroticised remix of the social and ecological violence of horticulture/torture, her sleeping eyes are equated with genitalia in the incisive threat of further optic penetration. Only when they are closed, “can she do no evil, either to others or herself”.¹⁰ But this is belied in the novel’s final image as she is confronted with the racist counterpoint of a “bronze ape” extending a “monstrous phallus” towards her closed lids.¹¹

Not surprisingly, the novel’s attempt to specularise violence through multilayered erotic voyeurism keeps coming back to the “private parts” as a site for optical illusion. The chief executioner tells Clara that in one of his more exalted inventions the mechanism is concealed. The “rat torture” involves a starving rodent placed in a box and strapped to a victim’s arse, into which it is incited to burrow to escape a hot poker. The episode anticipates a famous scene from another novel that also exploits a line between sexual violence and social power structures, Brett Easton-Ellis’s American Psycho. In it, the serial-killing and sushi-loving investment banker Patrick Bateman sleeps with a woman before causing a starving rat to burrow into her vagina.¹² The rupture of the genitals is a violent physical parody of penetration and sexual pleasure, like when Bateman goes down on another woman during a threesome and her moans of pleasure give way to screams of pain as he begins to chew her up. The optics of all these scenes are highly important, with Bateman’s care for his privileged physical presentation mirroring the sexual atrocities he inflicts on his often marginalised victims. In Le Jardin, the genitals meet the eye most explicitly in the “torture of the caress”: a man is restrained and masturbated rapidly for four hours by a plain-clothed woman, “not young, not beautiful”; an expert. The victim dies “in a jet of blood, which splattered the entire face of the tormentress”, a confusion of parts and liquids that twists the intense pornographic spectacle of the facial into a moment of horror, la petite mort into la grande mort.¹³

The continuum between optical illusion and genital cutting is extended in the watercolours produced by Auguste Rodin to illustrate the 1902 edition of Le Jardin. One depicts a boast from the executioner:

Yesterday, it was very strange. I made a woman out of a man. He! he! And it was such a good job you couldn’t tell the difference, and I myself was fooled looking at him. Tomorrow, if the genii grant me a woman … I’ll make a man of her. That’s not as easy! Ha, ha!¹⁴

Described as possessing the “joviality of a surgeon” the executioner is a literal sculptor of human flesh who remakes sexual forms. Rodin was himself better known as a sculptor; the more famous marbles of twisting bodies with heads blurring into the fundament strangely recall the cover of my father’s Dictionary of Sex. He renders the woman (who might be) made into a man by the surgeon with a spreading aberration that runs across her archetypal curve of hips, dripping down her thighs in bloody tendrils. She is curled against a plant of plain foliage, suggesting her as its singular bloom. At her groin the phallic smudge of a crocus appears, a floral motif that repeats across the series of watercolours to extend the novel’s suggestion of “human horticulture” in a language of bleeding flowers. But this print is significant because of the introduction of a spliced phallic part. It renders cutting not just as castration or penetration but also as haploid endowment: in this case the cause of the illusion as it spreads scotoma-like across the normative form. As Apter notes, the novel twists the ocular castration of psychoanalytic scotoma by operating according to a divergent logic: “the stain marks the spot where scotomisation fails to censor”.¹⁵

The possibility of optical illusions straightforwardly revealing the latent machinations of the individual/society is a common theme in their interpretation. Escher’s work, for example, perhaps the most recognisable artistic exploitation of optical illusion—with the exception of the Mona Lisa—struggled to find a place in the art world because it was perceived as too literal or didactic. As such, his images have been more often favoured by mathematicians and scientists over art critics. Only with the rise of 60s counterculture did Escher’s work begin to garner mainstream recognition, when his images found perverse place as sometime-guiding mats for tripping hippies. He was championed in Rolling Stone as the “godfather of psychedelic art”, indicating a belief that his work revealed something not just about the machinations of perception, but of the machinations of society as well.¹⁶ Indeed the landmarks of his work—enormous hands drawing the form of themselves, animals and humans tessellated as floor tiles, or people traversing impossible staircases—can be read through the countercultural metaphor of the era that cast the individual as a cog turning in a great machine.

The scientific uptake of optical illusions has likewise relied on the machine as a key analogy in understanding neural processes. Optical illusions have been particularly important in computational neuroscience, a field defined in relation to the analogy of the brain-as-computer, a powerful machine crafted not by humans or even their sky-god, but by the anthropomorphic hand of evolutionary selection. For such scientists, optical illusions reveal gaps in the brain’s visual processing software, with cues for depth, size, direction, etc. working in disharmony to give a false impression where they would normally be synthesized and accurate.

Consider a famous optical illusion that has enjoyed success in neuroscience as well as the memeing internet: Noboyuki Kayahara’s Spinning Dancer Because of a lack of depth cues that are given in the flat black silhouette, she can be perceived as spinning either clockwise or anticlockwise, changing directions depending on the viewer’s neurological processes. Though changeable, these reactions are generally bifurcated along the lines of who sees what first, a fact which spawned chain emails in the late 2000s claiming seeing one direction indicated a “right-brained” personality whereas seeing the other meant you were “left-brained”. It is interesting that, unlike other popular internet illusions, the dancer is sexualised in archetypal nakedness, with ample breasts, erect nipples and cutesy ponytail all being essential in determining the position she is facing. Her tight waistline forms a neutrality when she faces away/towards the viewer, uncertain of her next move. In explanations of the illusion’s function all these features are carefully noted, but they tend to gloss the subliminal sexual subtext. It adds a further boggling element for the mostly male neuroscientists and programmers who have fixated on the dancer’s illusion, her parts frenetically rotating over the glassy eyes of those who just want to know how she works. It is reminiscent of the popular and “curiously erotic” game many will remember from the 2000s: Tetka in which a blonde woman in a bikini falls corpselike through an adjustable gravitational field, colliding with bubbles to achieve all sorts of brutal and compromising positions. On the Spinning Dancer’s Wikipedia page, the bifurcated effect of her movement is given comparison in a rotating PET scan of a woman’s interior, and it is instead her organs that are definitive for direction discernment.

These telling touches bring us back to the question of cutting as it relates to optical illusion, and the sexualised perforation of the interior/exterior that seems to be suggested by them.

In 2010 computational neurologists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam produced a study that applied a logic of optical illusion to contemporary sexual practices, particularly as it relates to the consumption of pornography.¹⁷ Purportedly the first scientists to study sexual taste since Alfred Kinsey, their research had a profound impact on the field bordering on the sensational with the publication of their book A Billion Wicked

Thoughts. Their Penguin book deal caused many to question their motives as they sought to conduct part of their research on LiveJournal and other platforms for the slashfiction and incipient (pre-Tumblr) internet queer communities, where shoddy methodological practices caused them to be fatally cancelled for a highly leading survey containing several offensive language errors. But their research also drew on several non-survey sources, including search engine and porn site data as well as interviews with adult industry professionals, giving some credence to their findings, which are outlandishly interesting to my discussion here.

Ogas and Gaddam found that there were four major search terms that formed the basis of porn sought out by straight men. In order of popularity, these were tits, dicks, arses, and feet. Accordingly, they uncovered a prevalence that until recently has been relegated to a place of subliminal denial in popular culture: that girls with dicks are highly sought after by straight men. They gave the explanation that trans women, or “shemales” as they were termed by the researchers in line with porn terminology, represent an optical illusion in their simultaneous combination of all these sexual cues, which are otherwise separated by physiological possibility. The optical illusion of women with dicks was emblematised for the researchers in the Japanese anime genre futinari, which typically shows young schoolgirls with penises in a range of sexual scenarios. The appeal of the genre revolves around the apparent juxtaposition of the penis with the archetypal feminine form, complete with breasts, hairless buttocks, and small feet. The characters’ balls are sometimes substituted with vaginas too.¹⁸ For Ogas and Gaddam, anime represents a more “perfect” evolution of the illusion that was formerly mainly offered by real trans porn performers, presumably because drawn figures able to combine idealised feminine proportions in a way that eclipses what is typically possible in the real world. To put their argument another way: futinari was seen as effectively engineered as a genre of erotic illusion, combining major erotic visual cues in order to trip a misdirected desire response from straight men. It was this that caused the researchers to speculate that illustrated (or computer generated) erotica would eventually supplant real trans porn performers entirely, squaring the illusion away from the production of a body that has no place in evolutionary biology.

Ogas and Gaddam’s findings thus operate along computational neurology’s typical response to optical illusions, where in producing an impossible perception, they reveal gaps in the brain’s processing software. But the researchers also point to an expressly libidinal focus for this perception, where the line between seeing and believing is filled with spontaneous sexual arousal for the impossible. In this is a strange psychology that points to half-knowing that what one is viewing isn’t really “true”, producing a sort of uncanny, preconscious snapback not unlike the scotomatic retaliation that Freud’s ego inflicts upon the eye.

The theory of optical illusion also allowed Ogas and Gaddam to explain another trending sexual taste as it appeared for women around the same time: the fetishisation of the vampiric Twilight lead Edward Cullen. Like trans women, the alpha, love-ridden vampire was seen as activating a series of erotic cues but for women, including masculine devotion and protectiveness, physical prowess, independence, experience, wealth, and wholesome good looks. Cullen is a hundred years old but has the flawless skin of a teenager; he is a dazzle of shadow, a boy with a bloodlust who literally sparkles in the sunshine. The same uncanny snapback is presumed in this, where his fantastic status as a vampiric illusion means fans know he isn’t real, that he isn’t human in the same way that trans women “aren’t really” women, but desirability remains intact. But there is a distinction between the two monstrous illusions in the researchers’ logic: where the trans woman’s body is cut up into parts and cues, Cullen’s is wrapped inside a more complete narrative, a hard perfection almost too good to be true. His well-known bloodlust for Bella and gallant abstinence from giving into this hunger, “because he loves her too much”, makes of him an illusion like a glittering knife, desirable in the way Patrick Bateman is desirable, because he is capable of such thorough annihilation.¹⁹ So the erotics of cutting have implication for the viewing subject as well: if Cullen is hot because of his propensity to sever the bodies of masochistic fans, trans women are hot because they are already severed, such a fragile assemblage of parts that the straight guys seeking them don’t even have to chew their food.

But if Ogas and Gaddam’s adherence to computational neurology’s approach to optical illusions causes them to cut up the body of the trans woman into a holistically impossible series of visual cues, they also cut up the male brain into various discrete parts each responding to these cues. This sort of science has led to the by now familiar anecdote that the prevalence of foot fetishes is because the part of the brain that processes the perception of genitalia is adjacent to the part that processes the perception of feet.²⁰ Underpinning the theory is a “modular” approach to visual perception that cuts the brain into discrete perceiving areas. Rather than having a strict biological basis, this approach actually has its roots in computer coding, which early on encountered problems with often long and unwieldy reams of code that were too densely interconnected to easily read or revise. Hal Sedgwick and Barbara Gillam explain:

Such code came to be called, disparagingly, spaghetti code. As computers became faster, cheaper, and more capable, the emphasis shifted to … code [that] was more structured and so was more readily understandable. A key concept in this transformation was modularity … breaking the overall task of the program down into smaller units, or modules, and trying to reduce the interdependency between these modules.²¹

Shortly after the introduction of modular code, computational neurology begins to apply the same principle to models of human brain function. Sedgwick and Gillam go on to name a few non-modular mechanisms in visual processing, such as the interplay between local and non-local processing, relevant to the perception of optical illusions because it takes into consideration proximity of objects to each other when estimating their individual depths. There are a number of factors that are not taken into account by Ogas and Gaddam’s employment of erotic optical illusions that are taken into account by surrounding science and sociology, for example prior perceptual experience and broader social norms.

But regardless of the modular holes in the researchers’ analysis, their consideration of optical illusions also contains a latent self-critique, where the “cuts” of perceptual disjunction are surrounded by an incorrigible desire for whole typologies, exceeding the modular model of visual perception. Optical fascination may bleed into erotic arousal through the straightforward violence of cutting, but an image with a face has nevertheless been created. Irigaray is coming back to me again, with her riff upon Alice, a character in Michel Soutter’s absurdist film The Surveyors (1972): “Alice’s eyes are blue. And red. She opened them while going through the mirror. Except for that, she still seems to be exempt from violence.”²² Alice is confined to the house and the garden, her departed mother’s property, where she is visited by the surveyors of the film’s title and made love to. In the various visits however, she appears to change into a completely different woman, with a changed demeanour, hair, everything.

Who deserves more sexual gratitude, the woman who duplicates the possibility of sexual pleasure or the woman who offers it a first time? And if one goes back and forth between them, how can one keep on telling them apart? How can one know where one sits, where one stands? The confusion sits with Lucien. He’s delighted.²³

A hot cyborg, Alice’s inter/changeability is part of her appeal, wherein she can be phenotypically programmed in order to fulfil an endless possibility of erotic scenarios. The desiring look is befuddled by the sheer magnitude of these options, which are subject to a shaky snapback into rational surveying. “Can pleasure be measured, bounded, triangulated, or not?” Irigaray wonders. Alice is rendered human/not human with her “violet, violated eyes” having been through a mirror that can be read at once as a screen or alternatively as a knife.²⁴ The attempt to quantify her duplicity, to trace the code and formula of her, is the libidinal thrust of sexual cutting as projected through the new technology of the computer in modular cognitive approaches to mysterious desire.

Processing the violently desired body through concurrent technological novelties is an operation that unites Le Jardin des Supplices and A Billion Wicked Thoughts. Just as emergent sciences like botany and psychiatry, inextricably linked with the violent efforts of Western European colonialism, define the face of eroticised bodily atrocity in the garden, so the emergent power of Silicone Valley defines the bodies lustfully seen and spliced in the brutalising garden of the internet. The machine is real, and though the genesis I have traced of mostly white men’s dirty thoughts is specific, the infiltration of commercial computers and the culture they have created and feed upon is a recognisable and growing factor in the dynamics of desire. Literally shaping optics and shaping bodies, most of us are both party and subject to the culture that plays out in camera-captured tricks of light endlessly delivered to billions of greedy eyes on various platforms. Image culture is always shifting, activating a backlog of historical optical experiences; who among you hasn’t visited a porn site and experienced the jumping interruption of a pop-up webcam girl bored and rolling around in her room, or the diagnosis of a virus having infiltrated your Mac, meaning it needs cleaning right away, or else?