Cultural Engineering:
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
by Jeremy Patten
"There should be no limit to the redesigning of a human," Genesis has said. "The human body, in and of itself, as it stands, is not sacred – that's our conclusion."
They met in 1993, Genesis and Jaqueline Breyer, in the basement of Terrence Sellers' S&M dungeon. "We started out, because we were so crazy in love, just wanting to eat each other up, to become each other and become one...really, we were just two parts of one whole; the pandrogyne was the whole..."
The achingly beautiful Lady Jaye, guitarist for Psychic TV, dominatrix, and pediatric nurse, lived and died one of the world's most complete people. Genesis and Jaye underwent surgeries to mirror one another. Genesis did not have a sex change, contrary to some clumsy retellings of this chapter of hir story. Nor did Genesis forsee, when choosing hir name in the 70s, that s/he would embody such a radical reversal of the Bible's first book. The beautiful assumption of Jaye into her husband, Eve back into Adam.
Such an origin of the sexes is hinted at in some myths, and is famously spelled out in Aristophanes, but their medical and spiritual union really has no anthropological precedent. S/he has cited hir old friend William S. Burroughs as a possible inspiration for the steps the couple took to become one being with two bodies (the "pandrogyne.") Burroughs used to cut up works of art and make new art from the pieces, so, Genesis explained, "suppose you took two people and cut them up and reassembled them to look like each other. It would create a third being. And that third being could only exist when the two people were together."
It started with a vasectomy, a statement of their unwillingness to disseminate the tyranny of DNA. "DNA is an evolutionary parasite. And our bodies are merely the host enviroment in a symbiotic relationship with it. Our species replicates as much to perpetuate DNA as to perpetuate the species. In fact we see the I of our conciousness as a fictional assembly or collage that resides in the environment of the body," said Breyer P-Orridge in the Pandrogyne Manifesto.
The process of surgical merging (or, really, mirroring) required a willing plastic surgeon, which they eventually found. “We told him that we were doing an art project and about the idea of the pandrogyne... a reflection of what the new human species might look like in its early stages." The teeth posed another challenge, but that the process for creating to mirrored sets of teeth was so ingenious that the dentist, Mitchell Rubenstein, now gives a series of lectures (Genesis beams) "based on my mouth!"
If this seems like a passing oddity, this so-much-more-than-civil union, remember that in music, Genesis has this criterion of bona fide importance: s/he is more imitated than known. Everyone from Skinny Puppy to Johnny Cash has been directly influenced by the work of this seminal artist. Anything deriving from acid house or industrial has its source in Genesis. In the art of body modification, too, s/he is the original. Oliver Stone consulted with Genesis on the futurist drama Wild Palms, and it's likely that, in our future, sex will err on the side of union and joy rather than the reproductive pretext we have always given it.
Lady Jaye dreamed of a future where people could more completely customize their bodies, and say "I want to have fur like a tiger and little horns, and I want an extra eye on the back of my head, and four arms so that I can type and run something else at the same time." She died of an undiagnosed heart condition in October 2007, and was mourned by fans across the world. Genesis is continuing the surgeries, but has said s/he can no longer be interviewed on the topic.
And s/he didn't have to. The human presence we encountered in Brooklyn was a resurrection, and an apotheosis, of both the Genesis who created staged the show "Prostitution" in London (and was called a “wrecker of civilization” in Parliament) and of the dominatrix cum pediatric nurse who loved him. In their encyclopedic library of counter culture, we listened to the new album, Mr. Alien Brain vs. The Skinwalkers. It has a rolling, bellowing, almost classic sound. I ask about the title of the album, and she explains that skinwalkers are extra-dimensional beings who take the skin of another, and use it for their purposes.
"That basic lesson that the media has learned: that in a way editing is an invisible language. The people that control the media worldwide have become very intelligent and sophisticated in the use of that language,
of editing."
I get a sense that I shouldn't ask, but I do. "Are you a skinwalker?"
"No, dear," s/he says, compassionately. And then, she explained it all to us.
What will sex be like in the future? Read the full interview in the printed mag.
(Genesis most recently appeared at the Pompidou in April to accompany a film about hir life, and will tour the United States throughout this month. www.throbbing-gristle.com.)
