Re: [Netporn-l] netporn midlife crisis?
jordan's 6 scenes are certainly suggestive; i'm curious though, what exactly they are meant to suggest about netporn and it's putative crisis. are these set pieces offered to imply that the structures of reception, or of the production of, pornography, its digital transmission, and its circulation on the net -- between the laboriously constructed facades of the pseudonymous personas of that domain -- are just a version of the same structures which govern the sexual life of your average homo on the prowl? if that were the case, it would be a similar proposition to my own posting, in that there is an explicit extrapolation from a specifically homoerotic context to a more general case; and in principal i'm in favor of such claims -- if for no other reason than the perverse inversion that they perform. but, of course, there is a politics of such assertions. in the case of these 6 scenes though, i am caught on some aspects of their specificity which i think might be interesting to make more explicit. what does the writing reveal about the narrator in pieces (assuming that they are meant to construct a singular protagonist -- certainly six different narrators are possible)? does it go without saying that N is a man? and that the rather self-conscious construction of his masculinity is marked particularly by the vulnerability of his virile member to the gaze. we cannot but recall the complaint of some feminists (how many waves ago) that pornographic exposure as objectification constitutes a kind of violence of the gaze which is attendant on other more palpable violences which the body of the woman is liable to suffer. later waves have of course reconstructed these claims to allow room for the pleasures of being looked at; still, it seems worth recalling when trying to understand what is happening in these scenes where the construction of masculinity becomes scopic - and perhaps leaves other, more active strategies of masculinity behind. because the question for masculinity becomes how to protect its prestige, so invested in the activities of a phallic drive. that is, might the gaping maw of vision have teeth with which to sever that which the scion of man most esteems, from the place in which he expects (the other) to find it? this is a game of hide and seek, but this man takes out insurance on his member so that its membership is guaranteed in perpetuity. he does not give it up. he does not even risk it. he indicates both its presence and its potency by indirection: he turns his back (which he will not proffer either); he clothes it, enfolds it, or substitutes an armor of muscularity for it. these strategies of fetishistic substitution partake of that logic which reassures the man of of the presence of exactly that which he fears may be absent. the false and affected nonchalance of exposure, the feigned indifference to it, is paired with the insistent preoccupation with the potential for tumescence. the penis is never simply flaccid it is only ever on the verge of demonstrating its power. in the one case where it is fully revealed, the nakedness of the body is conveyed again by its substitute. the lump of clothes at the man's feet is the sign of flaccid exposure; meanwhile, the presumptively erect penis is the center of the other's slavish labors -- decidedly not the object of his gaze, for this would mean that the other has pleasure at the man's expense. instead the man receives his services while basking in the reflected power of his position -- standing as the other kneels. the pretense of exposure masks its ultimate refusal. the construction of this masculinity gives not itself to view, but rather exposes the constructed mask of phallic impenetrability. this is a noh play, not a strip tease and what we see is tengu's mask (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengu). a second indirection is to the mask of the drag queen -- who is herself a substitute woman. for after this wave (of feminism, or even after the previous) only the most crude misogyny can come to the fore unmasked. here it is only latent as the exclusion of woman from the scene and the portrayal of femininity as a kind of grotesquerie. the drag queen is not only self conscious about the construction of her femininity, she does not disavow her interest in its construction. she also courts the attention of the gaze, thus becoming twice castrated: once in her tucking of the penis (the panty and tape enabled opposite of the fetishistic and advantageous arrangement of genitalia into his designer skivvies), and again by the eye for the becoming object (of the male gaze). her inattention to attention -- the giving in to sleep which reveals her entire body to be the figure of the flaccid -- is what reminds the man to maintain his vigilance in regard to his image production: be not that other thing! the man is an emblem of paranoia: he is always on guard because he might be watched. and so he is always watching
Re: [Netporn-l] netporn midlife crisis?
Thank you very much for your reactions. David Heckman: And, if there is any problem that I see with online dating, swinging, etc its medium of expression overlaps significantly with the medium of pornography, KJ: Of course one could always decide to be a non-participant or a porn-free sexual organism, but let’s keep in mind the example of Alfred Kinsey who wanted to maintain a too rigorous division between sexual desire (life) and representation or documentation (sex studies). He could not develop a recognition about the urge to displace himself as “Kinsey” and the Kinsey Institute” in relation to the widening technologies of pornography and scopophilia, the social circles around him, the mechanisms of American puritanism. He was hoping to gather more and more reliable information by relying on empirical data (work) and was perhaps a bit unaware of how thousands had already turned their gaze upon him and his work as “Kinsey.” What I mean to say is that he was too much of a machinic busy beaver. We do have the technological means to develop more imaginative sex institutions, meet spaces, and to manipulate the projection of collective fantasies. I find it more interesting to take this opportunity rather than pulling out. Sometimes it is wise to listen to a fairy with a clear voice before taking action: Jordan Crandall: I have a role in these drawings; I help structure the erotic circuit through which they are produced. Yet I make no claims on them. I simply want to be fully present in the process itself. To completely inhabit the generating network. Not to reinforce my body (or self), but rather, in a sense, to displace it -- to generate an excess that always exceeds it. Ultimately it is this space of invention that interests me, rather than the drawings that result. They do not reveal so much as conceal. Crandall seems to sketch himself as a meditative and sensitive pornographic agent or model. This is a possible way of embracing and displacing oneself as pornographic data entity. It is always intriguing to see how other agents will react to such eroticism as an enigmatic and vulnerable intellectual pursuit. I can hear so many people grumble about it being intellectual rubbish. And others feel sad about the laceration of porn image regimes and discourses. And indeed we have to re-infiltrate those sites where people, share, rate and subvert their own content. Again, let’s think of an era when we are past the moral fear of “being found out,” past attempts at trying to look sexy for average mob viewers within a capitalist engine. But of course we still feel sexual energy as a positive force, specially when it is quirky and came unannounced. If you do a quick search on amazon.com, you can see that a whole new collection of books have just appeared on Internet Pornography. Most of the books are written by paranoid sexologists and are totally humor-less tales of how we are plagued by these shadows of illusionism and excess. Well, then we have to create hornier (=more unpredictable) shadow stories, because I don't think we can get back to an innocent sexual reality. The point is indeed to develop ways of taking our own seasoned shadows into sex meetings, relationships, educational efforts. There are some other factor involved. AFF is a male domain (9 males to 1 female) and males have to work very hard at catching females. Females on the other hand are cranky when receiving their sleazy and lazy pathetic messages. AFF males in HK are the already overworked white collar class and have no energy left to seduce, let alone to maintain relationships. They are mostly already married or attached and will tell you that their work and family comes first. I guess that shows that a fairy may sometimes be needed to slow them down and enter them. Trebor forwarded an interview with wired.com sex and technology correspondent Regina Lynn, recently published on the ‘On the Media’. She is in agreement that the porn industries are going through a midlife crisis because of the new demands for user-generated content and social networking within adult sites. She thinks that women-owned adult spaces are a better model to look at since they have developed these functions and figured out how to please clients on the longer term. “I said in a conference recently that if you want to build community in adult spaces, look to the women. The independent websites that women put together where they are the performers and they do the whole thing on their own as maybe their home-based business are all based on community and have been for more than 10 years - talking to their fans, talking to the visitors, building relationships with the fans, who then bring in other people and who then stick around. I know one Webcam performer who has had the same members for seven or eight years.” http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/09/07/08 I am not sure if is
[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
