[Netporn-l] netporn midlife crisis?
Hello list, I was invited by Trebor to share some views about the role of netporn in our lives and work. I hope that other people will respond to the lust question or perhaps bring in related issues. In my three years of working with Matteo Pasquinelli and the Institute of Network Cultures, I have met many like-minded porn intellects. I think that it is fair to say that a decade of work in the red light district of art and academia (and mailing lists) have resulted in some kind of overhaul. We have seen the emergence of more fulfilling and female-friendly, alt, queer, atomized, amorphous, fluid, artsy and cheesy porn cultures. The goals of this happier porn generation are unclear but debatable, and I personally like the small areas of progress--there are a wide range of post-moralistic and imaginative critical thinkers involved, and there is a tendency towards “hands-on” production in various layers of academua. We are now indeed able to use the digital technologies to produce and subvert porn as actual image sequences, to publicly screen recorded fragments of sexual longings, life-styles, documentaries about sexual politics, experiments with found footage, and to redefine the boundaries of pornography at conference and exhibitions. Of course many people and academics are against this kind of activism and the arousal factor, and overall believe that a tolerance towards porn productivity may cause nothing but hassle and legal problems. It is a premise that is simply out of control. For instance, in the Summer 2007 issue of ‘Cinema Journal’ several leading media and film scholars argue for the inclusion of sexually explicit illustrations in publications about porn, but the journal itself could not convince the printer to reproduce the actual images to go with their texts. Oftentimes the fate of the “explicit” porn generation is indeed still decided by paranoia and fear, kindled by globalized Christianity activism and new types of anti-porn legislation. One side-effect of the growing fights between lust and paranoid legislation in mainstream social networking (like myspace and flickr), is that sex affairs and seductions are more and more delegated to very horny ghettos, where the up/downloading of sexually explicit is actually allowed. After moving to Hong Kong in 2005, I started to look at the sex and swingers’ site Adultfriendfinder.com. A friend of mine had alerted me to some intriguing activity and sex blogs written by Hong Kong women (in English). I became member of the site as “Lizzy Kinsey” and stayed there for about two years to observe and interact with people, and to try to interview them for a documentary about online sex lives in Hong Kong. I was specifically interested in observing the interactions between chinese and caucasian people as I experience Hong Kong to be a tense interracial environment. I was also inspired by Lisa Nakamura’s work on people’s impersonation of blunt stereotypes to sell themselves in sexual pursuits. I invited the adult friend finders to send me stories about their sex encounters in Hong Kong, and received tons of mails. Even though I told people that I was a researcher and artist, they primarily wanted to have sex and would only reveal things as such. I became very interested in their very blunt seductions (endless cock images). I also tried to meet with some of them on awkward lunch dates where they shared experiences and still doubted my intellectual premises. And some documentation of my AFF interactions in images and a fictionalized account is now available in the “Lizzy Kinsey Report” (see below). And that brings me back to the issue of trying to study how the porn web has affected our work and our lust our arousal. Matteo Pasquinelli has responded to the Lizzy Kinsey report at the Berlin Film festival and outlined his dystopian views on porn agency as apocalyptic bodies and libidinal parasites. As he argues: “ The Lizzy Kinsey Report is about the effect of over-exposure, about the contradictory role of porn culture and our sexual digital devices. The conclusion of the Lizzy Kinsey Report is dystopian: internet fantasies, netporn consumption and online dating do not support progressive behaviours. Enabling fantasies only on a digital level keeps the public libido controlled and may reinforce conservative and conventional habits. Lizzy Kinsey discovers an alienation specific to the digital: internet as a libidinal parasite, siphoning our energy in change of few spectral images. At the end we have maggots in front of their laptops. How many are they?” We had read the reactionary accounts of behavorial scientists who believe that one can cure sexual deviancy by using specific porn arousal technologies (like penile plethysmography or vaginal photoplethysmography) and extreme methods of porn exposure. Sylvere Lotringer wrote an
Re: [Netporn-l] netporn midlife crisis?
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
