This Erection May Last Longer Than Your Life…
The continued perpetuation of self-gratification via the digital other is the state of our current society and constitutes itself as pornography. We purchase or invest ourselves in [an]other that we assume actually exists somewhere on the other side of a screen that is never truly a “screen,” but is a veil that obscures the present via a constant deferment and displacement of “now” into/onto a future gratuity that is always promised but never actually delivered. Thus is the state of our mutual masturbation in the online world: “Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose” (Bataille 170).
The merely commonplace is licentious pornography. I’m speaking of the portion of the internet that sucks away our time and is as typically shallow as “traditional” porn: social media and online shopping. Social media does what Lynn Hunt states of early political French pornography: it makes “the reader both a voyeur and moral judge” (325). We all love being voyeurs and we all love being looked at, right? We are capitalist whores that make use of trivial information as our currency, selling ourselves to have a piece of every digital ass we come across. I’m so glad those 687 Facebook friends are there to fulfill my every intimate desire! It is “a particular kind of interaction with the Internet, one that not only reflects but reinscribes social relations” (Patterson 108). We unconsciously abuse our physical selves when we undress our digital selves in our strip tease of what we think we are or want to be in a stream of twitter updates. Our digital lust is a never ending abyss that is never filled or fulfilled because it is constantly emptied and replaced by a different or newer lust. We’re just like cats chasing the seductive red glow of a laser pointer; always swatting and batting at something we perceive as real, but something that does not fully/truly exist in the physical realm. It is as Pierre Klossowski describes of Sade’s fictional world: “the world… is that of fault which comes to be unaware of itself once more” (109). We continue to ride a digital stripper pole up and down until the shallow orgasmic moment that the clicking of the “like” or “follow” button helps the [an]other get off on their side of the digital divide.
Capitalism’s midas touch has fondled and molested everything that had the potential to exist outside of its system. As pornography became a monetary endeavor that capitalizes on the instant gratification of base natural inclinations, it made it possible, and preferable, to transfer our physical lusts onto the digital realm of make-believe. It is, after all, only make-believe. There is always some amount of suspension of belief that leads to the conviction that what is simulated on any screen -computer, tv, theater, phone, GPS- exists or existed as a physical [em]body[ment] somewhere at some time. This transfer of our lusts into and onto the digital realm has been transferred back onto the physical world, as our lusts move from simulated image towards and away from the object that produces or conveys that image. There is always at every moment two objects of lust and/or desire: that which is being presented to us and that which is doing the presenting.
In every instance, there is a want of control over the other that denies the other as [an]other, defining them as object. However, the control that is central to this ritual exchange is never actually in our own hands, but manifests itself as apparition in the tenuous moment desire/lust is [trans]acted between two parties. It is in this moment where that which is considered lack, by the act of transfer and succeeding absence, is that which defines the joissance of the moment. At its most intrinsic values, pornography, including social media and online shopping, is about control over the viewer’s exchange. “The whole, obsessed as it is with maximizing power and sex, must be questioned as to its emptiness” (Baudrillard 49). One needs only to look at the history of recent Apple product announcements and the line of consumers that camp out days and hours ahead of time to be the first to own the object and the message being sold.
Everything is always already exchanged, so what is it being exchanged for? Capitalism’s primary currency is still the old-fashioned dollar, but as we vacillate between the presenter of the image of desire and the image, we are always relinquishing our ideas in exchange for a pre-packaged lifestyle. This is less about the exchange of ideas, and more about a stripping away of ideas, a forcing onto [an]other of unneeded “needs.” Just look at Amazon.com’s “recommended for you” suggestions, and see if anything suggested fulfills a need rather than a want. Pornography, as capitalism’s skanky step-sibling, functions as an operating system that can potentialize and monetize anything that can be sold or subscribed to through the pretense of an undressing or unveiling. “…this everything is also again buried within the obscurity of unreflective thought and unformulatable moments” (Blanchot 9). Pornography, as I am defining it, enrolls one into a system of predetermined notions that function as illusions that are only ever allusions to liberation, sexual or otherwise. Like it or not, it is about forcing onto the beholder ideas (politicized, capitalized, or neither) in exchange for some form or instance of (instant) gratuity. “The real becomes a vertiginous phantasy of exactitude lost in the infinitesimal” (Baudrillard 30). Liberation is a useless notion that has no means of existing within the constructs of contemporary society. No [an]other is ever entirely dissociated from that which makes it [an]other. No [an]other is liberated.
This world is a playground see-saw, precariously teetering up and down, slower, then faster in its perpetual repetitious movement of self-balancing pleasure. Everything has the potential to become monetized, capitalized, and commercialized. We forsake our physical bodies to imbibe imaginary digital others, creating and completing self-fulfilling proclamations of the contemporary American dream: I have the power to fuck you up the ass like the capitalist whore you are, because technology has given me the free reign to fuck myself, while I fuck you over, while you fuck me up the ass.
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. “De Sade’s Sovereign Man.” Erotisim: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986. 164-176. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. “Seduction/Production.” Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. 37-49. Print.
Blanchot, Maurice. “Sade’s Reason.” Lautréamont and Sade. Trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004. 7-41. Print.
Hunt, Lynn. “Pornography and the French Revolution.” The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800. Ed. Lynn Hunt. New York: Zone Books, 1996. 301-339. Print.
Klossowski, Pierre. “Under the Mask of Atheism.” Sade, My Neighbor. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991. 99-121. Print.
Patterson, Zabet. “Going On-line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era.” Porn Studies. Ed. Linda Williams. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004. 105-123. Print.
The continued perpetuation of self-gratification via the digital other is the state of our current society and constitutes itself as pornography. We purchase or invest ourselves in [an]other that we assume actually exists somewhere on the other side of a screen that is never truly a “screen,” but is a veil that obscures the present via a constant deferment and displacement of “now” into/onto a future gratuity that is always promised but never actually delivered. Thus is the state of our mutual masturbation in the online world: “Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose” (Bataille 170).
The merely commonplace is licentious pornography. I’m speaking of the portion of the internet that sucks away our time and is as typically shallow as “traditional” porn: social media and online shopping. Social media does what Lynn Hunt states of early political French pornography: it makes “the reader both a voyeur and moral judge” (325). We all love being voyeurs and we all love being looked at, right? We are capitalist whores that make use of trivial information as our currency, selling ourselves to have a piece of every digital ass we come across. I’m so glad those 687 Facebook friends are there to fulfill my every intimate desire! It is “a particular kind of interaction with the Internet, one that not only reflects but reinscribes social relations” (Patterson 108). We unconsciously abuse our physical selves when we undress our digital selves in our strip tease of what we think we are or want to be in a stream of twitter updates. Our digital lust is a never ending abyss that is never filled or fulfilled because it is constantly emptied and replaced by a different or newer lust. We’re just like cats chasing the seductive red glow of a laser pointer; always swatting and batting at something we perceive as real, but something that does not fully/truly exist in the physical realm. It is as Pierre Klossowski describes of Sade’s fictional world: “the world… is that of fault which comes to be unaware of itself once more” (109). We continue to ride a digital stripper pole up and down until the shallow orgasmic moment that the clicking of the “like” or “follow” button helps the [an]other get off on their side of the digital divide.
Capitalism’s midas touch has fondled and molested everything that had the potential to exist outside of its system. As pornography became a monetary endeavor that capitalizes on the instant gratification of base natural inclinations, it made it possible, and preferable, to transfer our physical lusts onto the digital realm of make-believe. It is, after all, only make-believe. There is always some amount of suspension of belief that leads to the conviction that what is simulated on any screen -computer, tv, theater, phone, GPS- exists or existed as a physical [em]body[ment] somewhere at some time. This transfer of our lusts into and onto the digital realm has been transferred back onto the physical world, as our lusts move from simulated image towards and away from the object that produces or conveys that image. There is always at every moment two objects of lust and/or desire: that which is being presented to us and that which is doing the presenting.
In every instance, there is a want of control over the other that denies the other as [an]other, defining them as object. However, the control that is central to this ritual exchange is never actually in our own hands, but manifests itself as apparition in the tenuous moment desire/lust is [trans]acted between two parties. It is in this moment where that which is considered lack, by the act of transfer and succeeding absence, is that which defines the joissance of the moment. At its most intrinsic values, pornography, including social media and online shopping, is about control over the viewer’s exchange. “The whole, obsessed as it is with maximizing power and sex, must be questioned as to its emptiness” (Baudrillard 49). One needs only to look at the history of recent Apple product announcements and the line of consumers that camp out days and hours ahead of time to be the first to own the object and the message being sold.
Everything is always already exchanged, so what is it being exchanged for? Capitalism’s primary currency is still the old-fashioned dollar, but as we vacillate between the presenter of the image of desire and the image, we are always relinquishing our ideas in exchange for a pre-packaged lifestyle. This is less about the exchange of ideas, and more about a stripping away of ideas, a forcing onto [an]other of unneeded “needs.” Just look at Amazon.com’s “recommended for you” suggestions, and see if anything suggested fulfills a need rather than a want. Pornography, as capitalism’s skanky step-sibling, functions as an operating system that can potentialize and monetize anything that can be sold or subscribed to through the pretense of an undressing or unveiling. “…this everything is also again buried within the obscurity of unreflective thought and unformulatable moments” (Blanchot 9). Pornography, as I am defining it, enrolls one into a system of predetermined notions that function as illusions that are only ever allusions to liberation, sexual or otherwise. Like it or not, it is about forcing onto the beholder ideas (politicized, capitalized, or neither) in exchange for some form or instance of (instant) gratuity. “The real becomes a vertiginous phantasy of exactitude lost in the infinitesimal” (Baudrillard 30). Liberation is a useless notion that has no means of existing within the constructs of contemporary society. No [an]other is ever entirely dissociated from that which makes it [an]other. No [an]other is liberated.
This world is a playground see-saw, precariously teetering up and down, slower, then faster in its perpetual repetitious movement of self-balancing pleasure. Everything has the potential to become monetized, capitalized, and commercialized. We forsake our physical bodies to imbibe imaginary digital others, creating and completing self-fulfilling proclamations of the contemporary American dream: I have the power to fuck you up the ass like the capitalist whore you are, because technology has given me the free reign to fuck myself, while I fuck you over, while you fuck me up the ass.
Works Cited
Bataille, Georges. “De Sade’s Sovereign Man.” Erotisim: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986. 164-176. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. “Seduction/Production.” Seduction. Trans. Brian Singer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. 37-49. Print.
Blanchot, Maurice. “Sade’s Reason.” Lautréamont and Sade. Trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004. 7-41. Print.
Hunt, Lynn. “Pornography and the French Revolution.” The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800. Ed. Lynn Hunt. New York: Zone Books, 1996. 301-339. Print.
Klossowski, Pierre. “Under the Mask of Atheism.” Sade, My Neighbor. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991. 99-121. Print.
Patterson, Zabet. “Going On-line: Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era.” Porn Studies. Ed. Linda Williams. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004. 105-123. Print.