i will want to answer these questions obliquely ... On 11/7/07 10:11 PM, "kjacobs" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Where do we find lust as lively porn-aided dating networks or sensual > porn-sharing? How can we participate in sex and swingers sites without > killing > our own sex drives? Is this just my own problem? How can we use porn > to get > aroused in sexual encounters (widely defined) and relationships? "In computability theory, a busy beaver (from the colloquial expression for 'industrious person') is a Turing machine which, when given an empty tape, does a lot of work, then halts. The machine pushes limits on the amount of time and space resources that a halting machine of similar sizes can consume." (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busy_beaver) the thing is, most turing machines never halt. it is trivial to discover an endlessly circulating turing machine, but challenging to find one that comes to a rest after working for a significant amount of time. the circulation of symbols on an endless tape, i have asserted elsewhere, partakes of the structure of cruising. and it is no coincidence: At 18, Turing’s loss of Christopher [the passionate friend of his boyhood] created a painful absence that he never successfully mourned. In the cruising practices of an England still governed by the same sodomy laws that condemned Wilde to prison, Turing sought solace and elicit pleasure. Eventually, in 1950, his contact with one boy led to charges of sodomy, a sentence of chemical castration, the loss of access to the computer he built with his own hands, and a downward emotional spiral that lead to his suicide. The narrative of Turing’s life makes of his flesh and ours a computational body which precedes and follows the computer’s entry into our consciousness and our lives. At the level of sexuality, emotion, and intellect a certain hollowness suggests a use: the serial filling and voiding of an emptiness which amounts to work – as both the mechanism and the vocation of programmatic exertion. We collaborate across temporal spans by inhabiting positions we imagine other's to have once claimed. Our bodies become spaces for the habits of others. This is how we work. This is how we love. This is how the machine goes and how it breaks. This is how we break. (see Christopher Marcom Being Dead, Alan Turing Contemplates Emptiness As He Encounters A Series Of Boys ... <http://onetwothree.net/portfolio/2004/christopher-marcom-being-dead- al>) in melding our sexual beings with the computer in a sort of cyborgian orgy, we accept the entailments of this melancholic structure. rare is the desiring machine which comes to rest. we take our places within the endless circuits of scopic desire. and here, what circulates are the decontextualized fragments of a an imagined sexual life: simulacral bits as images of machinic flesh: body parts as machine parts. the line of assembly, and the conjectural combinatorics of conjugation are the lust of design ... a conception of that impossible machine motivates a circulation that perhaps once found emptiness a sufficient motive. oh, but to find the n-state busy beaver which halts at step x or step y coinciding most delightfully and impossibly with our death. we must ask again: does this circuit follow us to meat space - to meet space? if we have entered a third stage of porn, past the porn wars and the Dworkian assertions that sexual fantasy permeates our situation in "real life" and past the (queer?) counter assertion that the status of sexual fantasy is distinct from (or perhaps even compensatory for) "real life", where are we now? perhaps the synthetic moment in this dialectic is the one in which we realize that the onotic and the epistemic positions are still at war. here is an example to contemplate: age play in second life. we know that pedophilia has a privileged role in the discourse of sexuality; in western (and especially american) culture, it is the limit case of the perverse and almost universally condemned. it may be the central taboo that structures our sexuality in a way that freud, for example, asserts the incest prohibition structured sexuality. so what does it mean that "age play" arises as one of the "popular perversions" of the virtual field of play - its quick recognition as an affordance of the particular techne of SL. just as quickly, it becomes controversial, forbidden, despised, ghettoized. one sees signs forbidding it in bars that celebrate a host of other perversions. the implication of a prohibitionary stance is that there is no distinction between the simulation of pedophilia and actual pedophilia where there is a question of consent, exploitation, harm, etc. we might also consider tendency of the behavior of avatars to mimic the way people structure prohibition into their sexuality more generally as part of the same problem: this one doesn't do anal; that one is only a top, this one only does girls, etc. etc., all as if there were "consequences" for a virtual dalliance. it may be that one must maintain and insist on a connection between the pornographic field and everyday life. is there is a danger of becoming unmoored, unhinged, vaporware? a eunich? Brad Borevitz <http://onetwothree.net> _______________________________________________ iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org) [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc List Archive: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/ iDC Photo Stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/ RSS feed: http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc iDC Chat on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647 Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref _______________________________________________ Netporn Mailing List Netporn-l@listcultures.org list: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/netporn-l_listcultures.org links: http://del.icio.us/netporn
