in development

SHOWING

In our cultural landscape of blogs, webcams, profiles, live journals, and lifecasting, the intimate lives of everyday people are on parade for all to see. One could say that a new culture of erotic exposure and display is on the ascendance, fueled by the impulse to reveal the self in ever-higher degrees of definition and transmission, enabled by DIY media technologies. In many ways this culture would seem to be less a representational than a presentational one, where we are compelled to solicit the attention of others, act for unseen eyes, and develop new forms of connective intensity -- as if this were somehow the very condition of our continued existence, the marker of our worth.

This new culture of self-exposure is also one of pervasive surveillance and tracking.  Here the revealed self is willingly constituted as an object of technologies of control, where its most intimate behaviors and inclinations databased and influenced by increasingly powerful monitoring techniques.  Perhaps the drive to willingly display the self constitutes a surrender to this controlling gaze -- the fulfillment of the dream of panoptic power.  Yet it also may suggest a shift in the dynamic of the game, for within these presentational environments, performance and role-playing reign supreme.  Individual identities become amorphous and amplified -- less reductive than excessive -- and new forms of subjectivity emerge. Whether oriented toward revealing or probing, the motivation is that of increased precision, exposure, and efficiency -- as if, through the elimination of the intervals of time and space, one could somehow touch the real.  Yet this drive, when followed through to its logical end, offers neither a greater degree of efficiency nor exposure:  distinctions begin to break down, as well the workings of desire itself.

These new cultures of self-display challenge us to reconsider foundational concepts in film and media theory and, consequently, to rethink the very conditions of our approach. For clearly these cultures are not necessarily those of mastery and visual pleasure. They do not resolve easily to questions around the politics of seeing. They are cultures of showing as much as those of watching. Instead of a reliance on questions of spectatorship, representation, and scopic power, we are challenged to foreground those of performativity, affect, and display. Instead of a privileging of reception, we are challenged to incorporate authorial intent or originary motivation. For these new media phenomena are not only texts to be read: they are solicitations, conductive excitations, embedded within networks of erotic exchange. There are pleasures and affective stimulations that motivate these new acts of connection, sharing, and erotic display, for all players on the circuits of production and reception, including both displayer and watcher. Their texts must not only be decoded but their circuits traversed, in implicated ways that destabilize any one-way analysis and its deflections of libidinous investment.

There is much to be gained in rethinking the dynamic between voyeurism and exhibitionism, compensating for the under-theorization of the latter. In film theory, concepts of "attraction" have provided useful tools in thinking forms of exhibitionistic address that counter the voyeuristic orientation of media analysis. In contrast to the mechanisms of maintaining a coherent narrative world, transporting the viewer into another time and space, attractions are those phenomena that directly solicit the viewer's attention in the here-and-now. They can take the form of spoken asides, addressed in confidence to the viewer outside of the diegetic space; as spectacles for their own sake; or as shots which exist purely to titillate the viewer, having no function in the advancement of the story. They prompt modes of apprehension that rely less on discursive flow than on direct transmissions that arouse or tease the viewer, engaging the immediacy of the bodily sensorium. In this way they are similar to the way that affects can counter meanings, or intensities can counter language.  

In the case of new media of self-exposure, sharing, and erotic display, one could suggest that the emblematic "pose" functions as such an attractor. The pose is a form of exhibitionistic spectacle -- direct address, performative display, or bodily stimulus -- that stands in contrast to the narrative or conversational flow of a social world, whether real or imaginary. It bypasses demands for narrative coherency and instead conducts transversal operations at the level of both the semiotic and the sensational, the reflective and the transmissive. It solicits attention while at the same time functions as portal or conduit for a reciprocal flow: a conductive excitation geared to develop some degree of connective intensity.

Since the pose feeds on reciprocality, it can prompt the changing of roles and positions. In this way it can be seen as a catalyst for identity-formations. Especially as witnessed in the database-driven format of the online profile within which the pose is often embedded, identity is performed through the adoption of specific (gendered) codes. One is called upon to play roles in order to assume symbolic mandates, to the extent that "impersonation" becomes a core act of self-identification. Yet the pose does not only operate extensively but intensively, and such "impersonations" arise equally through the internalized transmission of affects. Emergent forms of identity arise through flows of affective resonance that are themselves a powerful social and subjectifying force. 

This performative profile is also bound up within the activity of profiling. At this juncture of pose/profile/profiling, a contradictory realm of extreme intimacy opens up:  a site where the most intimate zones of bodies and persons are probed and revealed, analyzed through techniques of control and exposed through techniques of the self.  On the one hand, there is a bio-analytical probing into intimate states of bodily composition, movement, and affective disposition; on the other hand, there is a bio-compositional revealing, where bodies and selves are willingly exposed and displayed as collections of emergent, reconfigurable states of being.  Within this combinatory circuit, a newly visible and traceable body comes into existence, partly determined and partly self-determining, its forms and identities understood as arrays of statistical functions, material distributions, and anticipatory movements.  One can analyze these as apparatuses of seeing, but more compellingly, one can analyze them as assemblages of states of being. To explore the mechanisms and ontologies of this dynamical realm is to conduct a shift from the paradigm of the visual apparatus to that of the performative assemblage.  Here an emerging site of bodily composition and contestation is revealed -- a politics and a poetics.

Impersonations and internalizations can be understood to be driven by lack or by abundance. Psychologies of desire suggest that we are driven by a primary absence at the core of the psychic apparatus, which compels us to seek fulfillment through the gaze of the other -- an unseen watching presence.  The imagined gaze observing us becomes a form of validation, a kind of ontological guarantee of our being. It serves to put us in our place -- to subject us. In this way subjectivity is built on an anguished interrogation of the other's desire, often repressed as a "hidden" psychic logic to be uncovered.  As such these new erotic cultures of exposure and display can be seen as driven by the need to perform for the gaze of the other, and therefore to write themselves into existence -- installed in the symbolic order of things.

Yet at the same time, these insertions of the self into the symbolic order can be regarded as a way of channeling or dissipating surplus energy -- a problematic not of reduction but of amplification. We shift from a logic of psychology to one of spatial dissemination:  from an emphasis on analyzable identity to that of emergent presencing, where there is no longer a hidden psychic logic to be revealed but an extensibility to be traced (Bersani).  Here desire operates according to a different dynamic:  less a dance between bodies than a network path.  From such a viewpoint, the connective intensities that drive these new forms of self-exposure and display are those of expending excess, and the allure of showing could parallel that of sacrificing. The pose, as event-portal, becomes a double-edged solicitor.