week 6

rough notes

Think about the 'bird' building a stage for itself in the forest, and the man dancing on the streetcorner.

Man dancing in street, walkman, gyrating on the corner of Santa Monica Blvd & Vine, his arms open, head thrown back in ecstasy

Why is this man dancing here, on a busy street corner, and not by himself?

1. Sharing; making himself 'public.' Opening up the flow, cultivating mixtures, whirlwinds of sensation and movement, thought and affect, etc. - an urban conductor of sorts (Doug Aitken's video/Valery quote), enmeshed in the flows - but one who controls as much as registers, receives as much as sends. He is not a spectator here, he is activating -- opening up -- all of the sensory registers of his body.
He is "losing himself", if only to regain himself. Displace himself, in order to find himself. (Think of experience in dancing in a club)

2. the stage. Self-staging. He is not a spectator here either, but rather is putting himself on display, in order to prove himself, stage his worth, make himself worthy of being seen, mattering, counting. (As is putting up a profile - staging the self).

Process of self-discovery, self-construction: but a sense of self that can only be discovered in the social arena. And so why does he dance on a busy street corner, and not by himself?

Do we know who we really are, when we're alone? We speak of 'finding ourselves' - but does this happen in solitude, or in social space? We are who we are, because we are social beings, and we constantly need to see/feel ourselves in the eyes/apprehensions of others.

new cultures of self-display

think of work using blogs, webcams, profiles, live journals , lifecasting, and so on.
Enabled by networking technology and a DIY ethos -- as well as, of course, eros -- a new culture of erotic exposure and self-display has emerged. We don't just want to watch: we want to show. We want to reveal our most intimate lives.
We want 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.

Jennicam (search on web for archives)

In the psychoanalytic tradition, desire is polarized between lack and possession; the activity of desire is what moves one from one to the other..

In Lacan, the subject is imperiled, incomplete, characterized by a primary lack or absence: a lack that 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 (what does he want of me?). As Laplanche would have it, this is often repressed as a "hidden" psychic logic to be uncovered -- a "secret" that the other knows, but that we don't know. We want to understand the terms of the other's address: in the other, we pursue the secret of our own desirability.

Theories of desire built on lack: The world perceived as inherently hostile to the self (Freud); the world as withholding the "secret" of the subject's sexual being (Laplanche on the enigmatic signifier); the world as containing the subject's future completion as a coordinated form (Lacan's relationally initiating mirror stage): in all these cases the subject is either in danger of being stolen or has already suffered a loss of self.

Relationality is grounded in antagonism and misapprehension, which means that to meet the world is always to see the world as a place where I am not -- or, if I am there, it is as alienated and/or unrecognizable being.

Certainly, these new erotic cultures of exposure and display can be seen as driven by the need to perform for the gaze of the other -- the Big Other, the symbolic order. Through this performance, one is written into existence -- installed in the symbolic order of things.

But we can also consider that these new cultures of self-display are not just about insufficiency or lack, but also abundance. We can shift from a problematic not of reduction but of amplification? Already Bataille would have us do this: to focus on not filling something that we lack but of channeling the surplus energies that we already have.

Consider that these cultures of self-display are less about possessing something from a distance, than the evacuation of this distance: the cultivation of an extreme intimacy, a mingling, a channeling of energies. To explore this terrain, we can, as Leo Bersani has described it, shift from a logic of psychology to one of spatial dissemination: from thinking in terms of analyzable identities to those of unstable, emergent presences. Here there is no longer a hidden psychic logic to be revealed but an extensibility to be traced.
not a reductive self but an amplified or extended self. We don't reveal what's hidden so much as open up an abundant flow -- a conduit, an extensibility. And what we end up with is not a privileging of difference but of a kind of sameness. As Bersani would call it, an im-personal narcissism.

Here desire is constituted less as a differential dance between bodies than a network path: a new geometry of intimacy.


some more thoughts on online profiles:

A profile is both a portal and a facet of an assembling-self that reaches out to presence itself through a dynamics of encounter. It hovers between actual and potential; between diegesis and extension; between story and solicitation. The encounter that it aims for is a real, imaginary, or potential construct that exists both internally and externally, between the internal narrative space (which has its own structured timeframe), the solicitous address (which always exists in the immediate present), and the unrealized potential. It functions between staging, soliciting, and extending: between self-narrative, conductive solicitation, and connective, intensive extensibility. As such, profiles are mechanisms for the "staging of the self" within an encounter; the "pitching of the self" for a desired encounter; and the "amplification of the self" within networks of encounter. They are presencing mechanisms for developing ecologies of self.


screenings

JC video 'Hotel' at http://vimeo.com/7091631

David Lynch, Inland Empire