After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion

Introduction: After the Orgy

1 Introduction: After the Orgy It may comfort you to know that I am still not participating in any sexual acts. From a letter by Heaven’s Gate cult member Gail Maeder, to her parents in 1997 (Adler 37) These monks that just took their heads in San Diego; they’re way behind the times. Charles Manson to his parole board at Corcoran State Prison (Gleick 26) On March 26, 1997, thirty-nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult were found dead in Rancho Santa Fe, San Diego, their Nike shoes sticking conspicuously out of their purple shrouds. They had taken their lives in the belief that the Hale-Bopp comet was shielding an alien space craft that was to take them to the Level above Human. The ensuing media frenzy focused on several angles, separating what was unique about the cult’s mass suicide from what it shared with other extremist apocalyptic groups. The followers of Marshall Herff Applewhite (aka “Do”) were almost uniformly portrayed as deeply repressed and gullible innocents who had trouble distinguishing science fiction fantasies from “reality.” Editorials around the world could not resist puns involving these “alienated” individuals and their particular brand of X-Files-meets-Revelation rhetoric . In the following weeks, media commentators became obsessed with the voyeuristic revelation that six members, including Applewhite himself, had voluntarily castrated themselves in a surgical procedure designed to eliminate sexual urges—a serious offense to the neognostic ambitions of the sect. In the process, Heaven’s Gate became one more hyperreal coordinate on the psychosocial map of millennial America, where John Wayne Bobbitt was re-membered only to be instantly forgotten by a public whose hunger for the extreme devoured news of Aum Shinrikyo, Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Order of the Solar Temple, and the Oklahoma Bombing, in a globally expanding feast of apocalyptic proportions. Motivation, as usual, was the question that gave this story such momentum; Why did they do it? Applewhite was presented as being tortured by “sexual demons.” His idiosyncratic religion was viewed as the psychological escape route from his earthly desires, and more specifically from those homosexual impulses that compromised his career as a music teacher (Chua-Eoan 36). His followers were paired off in a surveillance strategy which, when combined with various hormones, bolstered the cult’s doctrinal policies on the need for celibacy. (Indeed, at one point the group founded “The Anonymous Sexaholics Celibate Church.”) Such rigorous libidinal constraints are commonplace among both fringe and established religions. The media, however, seized on its unprecedented intersection with popular culture, high technology, and voluntary mass-suicide. In a sense, Heaven’s Gate inhabited Bill Gates’ slipstream by using the Internet as its major informational vector to spread its gospel of ascension to the Level above Human. They were described as an “Internet Death Cult” (Levy 46), adding to the already prevalent fear that the World Wide Web is populated by insidious spiders just waiting for children to stumble across their path. While the hysteria surrounding sexuality and the Internet is not unrelated to my topic, at this early stage I wish merely to spotlight the way in which certain metaphors and discourses were mobilized in support of moral panics exacerbated by the liminal temporal space of the year 2000. (Prophecy has often been attracted to round numbers.) Newsweek, for instance, finds answers to the Heaven’s Gate riddle in not only Applewhite’s charisma and the “uncertain times we live in” but also in the “pull of millennialism through the ages” (Editorial 35—my emphasis). In its most general and abstract sense, this “pull” is the focus of this book, especially as it relates to the interpretation of twentiethcentury millenarian movements and moments. Assuming the libidinal connection between messianic figures and their followers, I explore the seductive power of the millennial concept, and its capacity to “pull” people out of their normal lives and into that highly charged psychic space that Frank Kermode fleetingly refers to as “the erotic consciousness” inscribed within the moment of crisis (1975: 46). In this sense my study represents an inquiry into the magnetic properties of a transcendent “floating signifier,” and the way in which prophecy and eschatology have filtered into our daily Introduction 2 consciousness. The years 2000, 2001, and 3001, the Millennium, the Eschaton1 , Utopia, Heaven, and the Level above Human: however we describe the object that lies at the end of history...