The rectum realizes that the brain by virtue of its elitist predispositions will in no normal circumstances condescend to negotiate with it. The rectum cannot plea with the bloody heart or the airy lungs because it is stereotyped by them as foul, low and stuck in feces.The notions of elitisms and stereotyping are inherently part of Feminist, Marxist and Postcolonial discourses. These theories roughly pose respectively that man, the capitalist and the colonialist are elitists while the woman, the worker and the colonized are seen as inferior and cast into negative stereotypes. See Simone de Beauvoir. The Second Sex. New York:Bantam, 1961; Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: UMP, 1983; Edward Said. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. In short, the rectum, after situating itself in the discourses of some postcolonial and feminist pundits such as Edward Said’s, Homi Bhabha’s, Franz Fanon’s, and Simone De Beauvoir realizes that it signifies “the rest” and “the other” in opposition to the “West” and to the “male”.
Driven by despair and fatal narcissism, and inflame by a revolutionary Marxist ideal it processed some while ago, the rectum realizes that there is nothing to lose but the bodily filth it is confined to live with.The reference is to Marx’s cry for the Proletariat to resist their bourgeoisie oppressors as they have nothing to loose in the process but their chains. See Louis Althusser. For Marx. Harmondsworth, England: Allen Lane, 1969. It rebels against and terrorizes the other organs in an attempt to gain their recognition. In the joke, the irrationally rebellious rectum coerced the other organs to acknowledge its right to leadership. Ironically enough, though the rectum succeeds in getting what it wants, nothing has changed in its positionality and functionality. It remains a rectum, situated where it was before and is still processing feces.
The rectum joke marks a postmodern era in which signifiers and signifieds keep referring to each other in a vicious cycle of language detached from real or universal referents.The notion of the arbitrariness of meaning and the referentiality of language to language rather than to a transcendental reality was first introduced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and then found its way into the discourses of deconstruction via thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. See Vincent B. Leitch. Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. The joke, like the Bakhtinian carnival, celebrates simultaneously the banality of the irrational and the submission of the rational to the irrational. Since the irrational does not reason, it becomes suicidal.
Postmodern terrorists those days adhere to the rectum’s irrational techniques in coercing the other societal organs to yield to their demands. The way the rectum terrorizes the brain into yielding to its demands in the joke, terrorists aspire for similar results in the real world. The blind terror and the ruthless campaigns of intimidation and indiscriminate killings taking place in many parts of the world, especially in the Middle East, are but a manifestation of the work of irrational rectums armed by parochial ideals of conflict management, and convoluted postmodern notions of the self and the other.
The post-11-September era has witnessed the rise and demise of so many rectums trying to intimidate and take over control from the other organs without success. In other places rectums are still trying hard, and even if at one point or another they temporarily manage to intimidate others into recognizing their presence, they will always remain rectums.
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