Towards a theory of virtual pornography: a phenomenological introduction to Interactive Sex Simulators in the "naive realist" paradigm.
To prefer the virtual being--at some remove--to the real being-close up--is to take the shadow for the substance, to prefer the metaphor, the clone to a substantial being who gets in your way, who is literally on your hands, a flesh and blood being whose only fault is to be there, here and now, and not somewhere else. (1) --Paul Virilio
In the epilogue to her seminal work on moving-image pornography Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible," Linda Williams asks, "what is the spectatorial experience of viewing and 'interacting' with sexual objects in a virtual cyberspace?" (2) The following will attempt to provide some answers.
Questions of virtual pornography are inseparable from corporeal experience. The fundamental constituents of this experience include the embodied perception and active look/solicited gaze (3) of the viewer/participant, a sense of trans-spatial disembodiment manifested in an avatar substituting as a digitized sexual prosthesis for the viewer/participant, and the decentralization of vision manifesting in proliferating selves; and subsequently, its appeal to a mnemonically resonant a priori imaging-consciousness to unify multiple instances of vision and corporeality into a singular illusory experience. Each constituent equally participates in the metaphorization of intersubjective sexual union where, as Virilio claims, the shadow is taken for the substance.
It would be a mistake to trivialize Virilio's warning as nothing more than fatalist prophesizing or polemical fear mongering, originating in neo-Luddite theory, over the waning tactility of intersubjective contact in the age of virtuality. The intention of his critique is to provide a necessary resistance against the near unconscious assimilability of new technologies into everyday existence. For this reason it is with some reservation that I appropriate Michael Heim's term "naive realist" (4) in situating the tradition of inquiry from which Virilio speaks. Heim's term suggests lacking judgment and sophistication and as I intend to continue this tradition of inquiry in an effort to identify certain pernicious characteristics of virtual pornography, it would not be in the best interest of my argument (rarely should it ever be) to speak from a position 'lacking sophistication.' In this sense, to call oneself a "naive realist" is a calculated risk, but a necessary one if I wish to acknowledge an open dialectical space for future critical intervention. In other words, what follows should not be regarded as a document chiseled in stone, but rather as a set of preliminary propositions inaugurating a detailed phenomenological critique of Interactive Sex Simulators (ISS) and the deleterious potential they pose to lived sexual perception.
A Brief History
As far back as 1979, Lynn Hershman's interactive video installations have sought to reconcile the divide between virtual and lived space with works "about the interaction and intimacy of people despite technological separation." (5) Hershman's installation Lorna (1979) is generally regarded as the urtext of erotic virtual interactive media as it provided participants with an attenuated level of interactivity modulated by a limited number of narrative possibilities selected in medias res; the navigation of branching narratives contingent solely on the participant's choices. Hershman would go further with her follow-up effort Deep Contact (1984) in attempting to suture the incompossible spaces of the virtual and the actual with an installation where the interface consisted principally of a female figure in which portions of her fragmented body act as navigational tools or portals toward increasing interactivity. At one point in the installation the female figure goes so far as to knock on what appears to be the glass partition (fantasy's threshold) separating herself from the participant. The work culminates in the figure uttering the request, "try to push your way through the screen and touch me." The appearance of both Lorna and Deep Contact is seminal not merely for the formal ingenuity of both or for the contribution each makes to installation art at the time, but must also be considered significant in a broader tradition of emerging visual technologies taking the sexualized bodies of women as its principal subject. In fact, the history of moving images itself is predicated on displayed bodies.
Prehistoric "cinema" (Marey and Muybridge especially) concentrated its efforts on capturing the "unseeable truths" of bodies in motion by mechanically recording "animal locomotion" in various states of activity. (6) Noteworthy here is the ubiquity of the nude form in these early experiments with chrono-photography. Although both men and women were recorded nude with relatively the same frequency, Linda Williams notes that, "while naked and semi-naked women perform many of [the] same tasks [as men], in their activities and gestures we see how the greater sexuality already culturally encoded in the woman's body feeds into a new cinematic power exerted over her whole physical being." (7) Or as Foucault would later posit, "... power exerted over bodies in technology is rendered pleasurable through technology." (8)
Little wonder then how or why Hershman chose the female form as her inaugural interactive subject. The sexually coded female figure well established over centuries of representation in the tradition of European oil painting was now thrust into the "accelerated intensity" (9) of mechanical reproduction to be "massified" and proliferated at an exponential rate, a proliferation that would lead John Berger to conclude: "... by generalizing both sight and viewer and making sexuality unspecific, desire (was turned into) fantasy." (10) Hershman plays upon this sense of fantasy perfectly and, though contextually dissimilar, predates the popularized ISS by 20 years when the female figure of Deep Contact insists the participant "push" his way "through the screen." (11)
My Plaything ... /Virtual Sex with ...
... it is the paradoxical nature of a (virtual) 'there' that seems to offer an escape from the presence and immediacy of the human body that needs to be examined in virtual porn. (12) --Linda Williams
Unlike Williams who based her examination of virtual pornography on several "adult interactive computer games," my analysis is based not on video games, but on simulators. There are significant differences between the two as Digital Sin's My Plaything ... series and Digital Playground's Virtual Sex with ... series will help to illustrate. These ISSs are paradigmatic, sharing a principal format and schematic interface that hierarchizes sexual activity into types and subsets; for example, intercourse would serve as a type and its subsets may include various positions (missionary, doggie, reverse cowgirl, etc.) and levels of intensity. Selecting a type from the interface opens up the attendant subsets, but shifts between subsets are precluded by the structure of the hierarchy. The strictures imposed by the hierarchy on the participant's ability to shift between subsets and the subsequent experience of control-as-limitation is moderated by the availability of several other functions of mastery. Icons are provided within the interface of the ISS that a participant can highlight and select if he wishes to change his virtual partner's demeanor (the options being "naughty" or "nice"), change viewing positions, control the intensity of his virtual partner's vibrator or make his avatar or virtual partner "Cum on Q." It is also significant to note that ISSs are the only forms of pornography to consistently rely on the use of counterfeit money shots to represent the veracity of male pleasure. (13)
ISSs privilege the POV shot of the male participant (14) and his avatar whose body is halved from the mid-section down. In the conspicuous absence of the objective male body within the virtual environment (no establishing shots, no voice and no shots above chest level of the avatar) the visual perspectives (POV) of the avatar and participant are married. The virtual woman almost always directly addresses the wedded perspective of the virtual/actual man and is never distanced beyond a medium-shot from this twinned gaze. The frame typically remains static except when illusory demands necessitate its dislodgement, as in the case of virtually performing cunnilingus whereby the parameters of the frame become expressly analogous to the perceptual boundaries of vision; or, more simply, the frame moves as one's perception of depth might if in actuality he were performing oral sex on a female partner.
In the case of the My Plaything ... series the virtual environments tend to be recognizable locations (a massage parlour, an office, a mansion, etc.), which in turn directly motivate, by context, the character of the virtual woman. For example, if the virtual woman is situated in a classroom it should follow that her appearance, depending on whether or not the fantasy calls for submission or dominance, will take the form of a short-skirted, acquiescent student or a ruler-wielding, conservatively dressed teacher. These fantasmatic spaces are ostensibly familiar and eerily abstract (or as Freud might say, unheimlich), producing an experience of lacking anchorage to the living world. In some sense, these virtual environments may be conceived of, in Deleuzian terms, as "any-space-whatevers" (15) insofar as they represent a reconceptualization and defamiliarization of empirical spatial experience. Following Deleuze's lead (here appropriated out of context), Mark Hansen usefully frames Deleuze's concept in the register of the digital when writing, "it is like the cinematic any-space-whatever in that it demarcates a fundamental shift in the experience of space, a shift from an extended, visually apprehensible space to a space that can be felt only by the body." (16) The participant is invited to "experience" a space he is familiar with, but one that has no discernable geo-physical coordinates. What results is a paradoxical experience of compassed dislocation where one simultaneously knows and does not know where one is. (17)
In the Virtual Sex with ... series we are faced with an inverse scenario: the virtual environment consists entirely of black space without any geographic markers or objects (save the occasional vibrator or dildo). What we are confronted with then is what Mark Hansen might call a "digital-any-space-whatever." Hansen explains,
... the digital-any-space-whatever comprises a bodily response to a stimulus that is both literally unprecedented and radically heterogeneous to the form of embodied human experience. To put it more simply: because it must be forged out of a radically inhuman realm, the digital-any-space-whatever lacks an originary contact with a space of human activity ... and thus any underlying analogy-- from which affect can be extracted. (18)
The black, "inhuman realm(s)" comprising the diegesis of the Virtual Sex with ... series are "digital-any-space-whatevers" par excellence, spaces where sexual union in its heightened, fantasmatic state displaces corporeal perception from its last vestiges of experiential reality, disoriented as it is in virtuality, and confers it upon nothing but pure space.
So, then, concomitant with the telesexual decentralization of the self dispersed through a circuit of analagous visual perspectives is the fabrication of polymorphous space. In the first instance (My Plaything ...) one's virtual environs are formed from depthless signifiers (19) proffering an impression of reality unable to achieve a sense of multi-dimensionality, buckling, as it does, beneath the insurmountable weight of the sexual fantasy it backdrops. In the second instance (Virtual Sex with ...) the geophysical world is ejected from the scene and any object whatsoever disqualified from the space, to remain only as such, just space. As if avatar and woman were launched up through the ether, into outer space and propelled past the stars to consummate this next stage of sexuality in the nothingness of the final frontier.
In the course of enumerating some key features of interactive sex simulation and for the sake of clarification we might briefly digress to illustrate how the simulator form is fundamentally incommensurable with the video game form. ISSs and Interactive Adult video games, though similar in appearance, are quite dissimilar: the latter is, by nature, temporally bound to a linear structure and demand that arbitrary hurdles be leapt in order for progression to occur, inevitably leading toward achieving a particular goal (ex. Virtual Vixens). Moreover, video games (particularly "First Person" games) have a tendency to use "cinematics" or cut scenes to narrativize the action with plot segments utilizing the codes of Hollywood cinema. Conversely, ISSs are barrier-free, non-linear structures that establish manifold linkages the participant is free to make whenever he chooses. ISSs only abstractly narrativize action to initially construct the fantasy and when doing so rarely break from the avatar's POV.
Within each ISS, representations of body and space bring with them an entirely new set of propositions regarding the depiction of sexuality, its conduct, and its attendant phenomenological experience, leading us to reiterate the question, "what is the spectatorial experience of viewing and 'interacting' with sexual objects in a virtual cyberspace?"
Three States of Consciousness: Exteroception/Interoception/Proprioception, or Virtual Sexuality and its Vicissitudes
ISSs pose a variety of questions regarding perceptual states and the experience of mutable spaces in several registers of consciousness, one of which is exteroception. All things appertaining to the excitation of sense organs from stimuli outside of the body are exteroceptive. The effectiveness of a simulator in "provid[ing] an operating imitation of a real activity" (20) is predicated on its ability to reproduce contextually specific effects on the human sensorium. In aerospace research the flight simulator is designed to appropriate the perceptual conditions and affective responses of actual flight to the highest possible degree for the participant of the simulation. It achieves this by replicating dromoscopic sight lines, "real" force-feedback from cockpit controls, reproducing soundscapes and simulating various psychological conditions (i.e. flying a passenger airliner contra flying a jet fighter) procured through the illusion of flight. For pilots, it serves as both a perceptual model for training sensorial responses and eliciting necessary reactions to a given situation, as well as a pedagogical tool in aid of developing required skill sets.
From the flight simulator to the sex simulator, from the illusion of aeronautics to the illusion of copulation, it can be said that both exteroceptions are fundamentally of the same order. Regardless of intention or purpose each simulation postures reality through an imaginary spectacle requiring similar sensorial engagement. The sex simulator, like the flight simulator, necessitates an active spectatorship to negotiate the types and subsets (21) particular to a given interface while employing the participant's sensorium to such a degree that ascribing the pleasures accumulated by his avatar to his own body seems logical.
As the POV shot is the privileged perspective of both the flight simulator form and the sex simulator form and appeals directly to the exteroceptive reality of the subject in synchronizing the experience of virtual materiality with actual materiality, might we not say that ISSs, like flight simulators, are capable of pedagogical effects? And if there are pedagogical consequences resulting from the consciousness of a virtual reality by an exteroceptive reality, how might we account for the bridging of this gap between these two vying impressions? In his doctoral dissertation, and with particular erudition, Ryan Joseph Burns makes recourse to Barry Brummett's "Homology Hypothesis" to help explain how one might link the perception of mediated pornography to a lived intersubjective encounter. Burns writes,
The Homology Hypothesis maintains that when there are formal parallels among content, experience, and medium, the content affects the audience's motives for living through "real" or unmediated experiences. The message in the medium gains its power from emphasis and repetition, and this occurs when the medium makes the same points found in formal links between content and experience, as well as a representational experience of the account. As both an experience and a representation, 'the medium does this by serving as a formal bridge between the fictitious media content on the one hand, and the real world on the other' ... The medium is a real experience but in an imaginary, fictive context ... (22) (Italics mine)
The threshold of the interface and the transhorizon perspective it gives rise to serves as an interstice between two homologous perceptions (one actual, one virtual) addressed directly by the woman within the simulator. Apropos of ISSs, Burn's use of Brummett's "Homology Hypothesis" suggests that the technological partition of the apparatus is not an object inertly facilitating or mediating an experience, but is an accessory to the complex facets of the sex simulator and is complicit in the effects it produces. The absolute control wielded by the participant over the actions of the simulator woman and the pleasure she imparts upon his avatar is achieved directly through his actual control of the interface. Thus, actual tactile control of the technology facilitating the control of the virtual interface engenders a sense of mastery in two registers that amplify rather than interfere with one another.
Ultimately, ISSs necessarily seek to elicit exteroceptive responses to virtual sexual experience homologous to those of actual experience; like the flight simulator, this is the purpose of the simulator form. It achieves this by privileging the subject position of the participant through the imaginary subject position of his avatar and concentrating the sum of the simulated woman's attention toward him. Along with positions of mastery accorded to his visual and auditory fields, the participant's tactile manipulation of the optoelectronic interface assures him complete control over all available aspects of sexual representation, consequently returning to Foucault's assertion, "... power exerted over bodies in technology is rendered pleasurable through technology." If Foucault is right and Burns' use of Brummett's theory is indeed tenable, with the pedagogical capabilities of the simulator form, such as they are, we can conceive of the ISS as a training apparatus where the experience of sexuality is configured as a unilateral conjunction of phallic pleasure and control.
At a purely external level of meaning the subject's exteroception registers the qualitative impressions of the simulator, but beyond the realm of empirical reality an exteroceptive analysis proves limited. Understanding the sex simulator form requires a critique that breaches the illusion of the participant's ostensible sexual mastery, or rather his transmastery of virtual and actual pleasure experienced simultaneously in incompossible registers by an empirically multiplied, yet psychically unified self. This illusion is the ISSs greatest (and most alarming) achievement: to phenomenalize alterity and mask the dementia of an intentionally fabricated aesthetic of disembodiment that concurrently purports to offer the "most realistic sexual encounter ever." (23) The success of this illusion is predicated on the "subjective feeling states" elicited at an exteroceptive level of consciousness and subsequently internalized at an imaginary level where these feeling states take on idiosyncratic meaning for each participant. This idiosyncratic meaning might be expressed more precisely through two internal states of consciousness: interoception and proprioception.
Traditional definitions suggest that interoceptions are not predicable of external stimuli since they relate particularly to a physiological awareness of the self and sensitivity to (consciousness of) internal stimuli a priori independent of the external world. Contrapuntally, it may prove productive to conceive of interoceptions having resonance with exteroceptions rather than remaining mutually exclusive. In elaborating a phenomenology of virtual sexuality, or any discussion of virtuality whatsoever, the primary issue remains with the participant and the altered states of his bodily experience. Charles Tart's concept of the body image is a useful paradigm in this regard as he demonstrates interoceptive consciousness occurs at a physiological level from input within the body, but is also susceptible to the body's aggregate of external experiences. In States of Consciousness, Tart writes, "you not only have a real body whose actual sensations are picked up by the interoceptors, but, in the course of enculturation, you have learned to perceive your own body in learned, patterned ways, just as you have learned to perceive the external world in socially learned ways. The degree to which your body image corresponds to your actual body may vary considerably." (24) Along with the body's consciousness of internal corporeal input, Tart proposes a symbolic dimension to interoceptive reality independent of actually occurring internal stimuli. How the subject perceives alterity visually represented in the ISS's aesthetic of disembodiment as a singular experience comes into sharper focus through Tart's notion of body image. Tart goes on to write, "an individual's body image may be very stable. An intriguing example of this is the phantom limb phenomenon. When an arm or a leg is amputated, the patient almost always reports he can still feel the limb, even though he can see and otherwise intellectually know it is not there." (25) In some regard does the masturbatory utility of the ISS not give way to the participant's sense of his corporeal locus of pleasure as the penis qua phantom limb? The subject's willing surrender of his intellectual acumen in knowing "it is not there" does not stop him from feeling pleasures performed on the avatar's body.
Thus, one would not be amiss to suggest the participant's body image allows him to refer the sex acts performed on his avatar to his own body, thereby onanistically achieving an irrational fidelity between incompossible space-time events. The participant's interoception of his pleasure center is thus mirrored with the quasi-interoception of his avatar and any excitatory visuals registered at an exteroceptive level as alterity are ostensibly unified in an interoceptive register where the actual (I am here before the interface) and the virtual (I am there inside the interface) are blurred in the imaginary (I am here and there, but the pleasure is one). This is an important distinction because it is not a matter of the participant believing that he has literally crossed over into virtual space and is in direct contact with the woman in the interface. This is not how the ISS achieves its effects. (26) In Hard Core, Williams similarly remarks, "... I would argue that today's 'interactive' sensation seekers do not really think they are actually immersed in the virtual worlds depicted. Their pleasure seems to lie elsewhere." (27) This sense of "elsewhere" Williams suggests, a "vague intuitive zone" as Sartre might have called it, can be located in the register of the imaginary. (28) The fantasmatic scene offered by the ISS draws its affect not from a tangible intellectual belief, but from a suspended disbelief sustained in the imaginary where incongruencies in perception and pleasure sensibly coalesce; an imaging-consciousness rationalizing the phenomenological dementia of interactive sex simulation vis-a-vis Burns' "fictional context" and/or an associational awareness through the participant's sense-memory (corporeal context) allowing him to more easily braid fantasy with reality.
Corporeally, sense-memory may be apprehended at a proprioceptive level of consciousness. Through repetition the body can become acclimated to given sets of action. Proprioception acts as a kind of sixth sense unconsciously regulating muscle coordination in response to exteroceptive stimuli requiring movement, "it is the sense that indicates whether or not your body is moving with required effort, as well as where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other." (29) Buttressing a suspension of disbelief in the imaginary (an act of consciousness) sustaining the heteromorphous relationship between man and avatar is an unconscious proprioception in charge of "second nature" bodily responses to stimuli. So, as a higher order active consciousness negotiates its body image in the wake of selective suspensions of actuality and the fantasmatic supports that procure illusions of visceral sexual activity, proprioception does the job of ensuring that the body maintains its motor-sensory awareness of space by responding accordingly to the external stimulus. These proprioceptive responses have two dimensions (30) operating simultaneously: a developmental stage where sense-memory is trained and acts become "second nature," and the function of sense-memory acquired through repetition whereby actions are "second nature." Thus, as a clear and present state of (un)consciousness, proprioception habituates the spectacle of the simulator for the participant, replete with its elision of male identity in lieu of an illusory projection of the self across the threshold of the interface, alongside his lived intersubjective sense memories where, at its most extreme, one indiscriminately telescopes into the next.
After the pedagogy of the simulator's representation of actuality at the level of exteroception comes the meta-pedagogy of the muscular system at the level of proprioception, to say nothing of the illusory support of an interoceptive consciousness actively masking the pedagogical and meta-pedagogical implications of "... a virtual reality that offers ... us a considerable advantage of being both more real than imagination and more easily controlled than concrete reality." (31)
Might we not relate the interplay of these states of consciousness appertaining to virtual sexuality to the drama of identity formation in the Lacanian "mirror stage?" All of the constituents, to some degree, are present: the subject identifying with its own image/reflection, the misrecognition of the image as a unified self inspiring future identification processes, the incommensurability of the perceived powers held by the image in contradistinction to the ineffectual body, and the formation of an "Ideal-I" toward which the subject will perpetually strive.
Although, in some sense, is also not the opposite the case? In virtual sexuality the reflection of the body in the looking glass gives way to an extension of the body in the interface where the subject's effectual body controls and manipulates its identificatory image as it sees fit, with questions of the formation of an "Ideal-I" toward which the subject strives left open to conjecture.
Suffice it to say there are numerous rich and complex areas requiring investigation in the problematic of the self qua other and the other qua self in sex simulation. By way of illustrating the role played by particular states of consciousness engaged in sex simulation we have endeavored to construct a theory that elaborates the perniciousness of deriving sexual pleasures through representations of bodily dispersal. The ways in which ISSs link pleasure with the disunification of subjectivity transcends traditional notions of alterity as a self/other binarism and gives way to the phenomenality of an increased polymorphic otherness.
Circuits of Vision
The Third "Self"
The visual and visceral pleasures solicited by [ISS] seem not to be aiming for an extreme reality effect (as in, "this is real! I am there playing with her!) but rather for an uncanny sense of dispersal (as in, the more divided and distracted "I" am here playing with myself and "I" am also there playing with the vixen!"). In this sense "interactivity" could be defined not as an exchange or communication between self and other but rather as the mobility of a "self" interacting with two vying impressions of reality each of which is slightly lessened in effect by the interference of the other. (32) --Linda Williams
It is not unusual in dreaming life to experience states of alterity or several different concurrent states of awareness. Lucid dreamers are said to be able to experience multiple selves on a plane of suspended consciousness achieved during sleep. Accounts of lucid dreaming describe heightened states of awareness in which the suspended consciousness of sleep gives rise to the consciousness of a dreaming self experiencing the phenomena of a dreamt reality. This dreaming consciousness is said to be aware of itself and of the suspended consciousness of the inert physical body, but what is more remarkable is the fluidity of this dreaming consciousness in manifesting alternate states of consciousness that remain constantly aware of a higher consciousness in spite of dispersal. "I became perfect nothingness going into perfect nothingness. The part of me that had not yet gone through [the object] was experiencing overwhelming ecstasy, so much so that I could hear myself moaning from it and had to observe this experience from a third self," (33) recounts one lucid dreamer whose feeling of ecstasy in dreaming consciousness was such that it could only be appreciated from the observatory position of an even further divided consciousness, "a third self." This lucid dreamer goes on to write, "eager to experience the ecstasy again, I leaned over and kissed [the object]. Once again, I experienced overwhelming ecstasy, that had to be observed from a third self." (34)
Lucid dreaming offers at least three vying impressions of reality: the first self--the self that is sleeping, the second self--the dreaming self, and the third self--the observer. Transubstantiation from the first self to the second self occurs as an ethereal extension of the living body into an alternate bodily state of consciousness. The experience of "overwhelming ecstasy" in the register of the second self is said to be a catalyst for the dispersal of consciousness into a purely optical third self whose only function is to witness the pleasure of the ethereal body. Similarly, ISSs offer 3 vying impressions of reality through a perspectival projection in stages, successively increasing the sensation of being 'divided' and self-objectified (the thrill of corporeal loss). The first perceptual move away from an embodied "I" resides in the transference of the participant's optical sightline (visual perception in the first degree) and an investment of subjective vision into the optical sightline of the apparatical POV shot whereby the participant becomes a "corporealized observer;" (35) or rather, the "vision" of the avatar is a new disembodied perception extended from the body's primary optical sightline. In other words, the participant looking into the interface, across its horizon and into the virtual environment can be described as the primary instance of vision. The participant's virtual double, which he is bound with at an identificatory level, is presumed to possess its own optical facility. This can be described as a secondary instance of vision, the vision of the participant's "second self."
This is the "uncanny sense of dispersal" between "two vying impressions of reality" Williams refers to, but ISSs, like the experience of lucid dreaming, offer a third impression. All ISSs provide a second or alternative camera angle from which to view the action. This second angle is typically situated 60 to 90 degrees away from the original coordinates of the POV shot maintaining a relative focal length. What is noteworthy about this move is its static depiction of what has already occurred, but from a perspective outside the POV of the avatar (secondary instance of vision) that leaves one with a feeling of being uncanny. The participant has the sensation that he is viewing events from a third instance of vision, or rather, from a third self. Expressed differently, the primary visual code of virtual sexuality is the POV shot and the reasons for its use, by now, are obvious. What is of significance here is the second shot or angle ISSs elect to utilize: a static shot, outside of the visual scope of the POV shot, that brings the viewer into closer proximity to what the original POV shot depicts.
This second shot highlights an odd conundrum: the POV shot is not the visual identificatory code that raises the level of visual pleasure or experiential reality from the image to new heights as is purported or as it first may seem. At work is a three-pronged visual circuit that achieves optical inebriation in the second shot/angle (third instance of vision) through the illusion of the participant's total disembodiment and sexual decentralization. A mirage of hallucinatory mastery over the virtual flesh event where one can identify with a body not only outside of one's own, but outside of one's own double. This is a citational chain of projection that begins at the level of the body and is mediated through a virtual double, subsequently achieving erotic acme in the move to a doubly disembodied, 'impossible' observatory state: a third self.
As in lucid dreaming, the "overwhelming ecstasy" of disembodied pleasure in interactive sex simulation is such that a third self is provided as an optional perspective from which to observe one's enraptured otherness. How then can ISSs lay claim to providing the "most realistic sex experience ever" when the experience exhibits more commonalities with ethereal dream states than intersubjective reality? This claim of realism could only be tenable if in fact sex increased in realism congruent with the disequilibrium of corporeality, conflating, as it does, the pleasures of sexuality with increasing disembodied (di)visions. Therefore, if the body's tactility is no longer able to constitute "real sex," sexual authenticity in the 21 st century will be corroborated to some degree by the pleasures experienced in the "perfect nothingness" of eyes without a face.
From Disembodiment to Disappearence
If we quote Virilio at length from War and Cinema and paraphrase his text by supplementing its key terms to suit our context (which we will italicize) what occurs is an uncannily fitting diagnosis of the fate of sexual visual perception. An endeavor of this sort would read as follows:
This total transparency affecting object, subject and surrounding space--which makes the corporealized observer feel both that he is being watched by his virtual partner and that he is observing his own body from a distance--illustrates the derangement of perception in an environment where visual technology is distorting not only the flesh event, but also, and especially, the space-time of vision where the optoelectronic interface and the sexual encounter are conjoined to such a degree that Junger might (have said): "The faculty of thinking logically and the sense of gravity seemed to be paralyzed. (36)
The "body" or "person" the participant of ISS is asked to identify with, ostensibly, has no identity. All Virtual Sex with ... and My Plaything ... simulators on the market neglect to identify the male figures of its virtual environments. Representations of male identity are elided entirely from the text and reduce male images to faceless, voiceless 'fucking' machines. The woman in the virtual environment appears to be addressing the man within the interface, but in actuality she is directly addressing the participant. She in fact is looking through the man she is actually performing on, and must do so to procure the effect of 'performing' on the participant, effectively producing an "aesthetics of disappearance," as Virilio might say; a logic of transparency that is frightening to envision from the perspective of the woman who performs on a man who isn't there while addressing a man she cannot see.
John Berger noted a similar phenomenon in some Renaissance paintings: "it is true that sometimes a painting includes a male lover. But the woman's attention is very rarely directed toward him. Often she looks away from him out of the picture toward the one she considers her true lover--the spectator-owner." (37) Much is typically made of the male position of visual dominance outside of the text, but it seems a bit more needs to be said of, what appears to be, a perpetuating tradition of eliding male identity from sexually codified texts in lieu of addressing his real world counterpart. Contemporary pornography offers countless instances, virtual sexuality being one, where male identity is eschewed in favour of purely phallic representations. The space between phallic displays and the disappearance of male identity in various sexual depictions will require greater critical inquiry if the sex simulator and its eroticization of disappearance and proliferation of modes of self-reflexive vision are any indication of how we perceive "realistic" sexual experiences in the 21 st century.
Conclusion
According to Freud, reality may be limited to perceptions that can be verified through words or visual codes. Therefore perceptions are the drive to action that influences, if not controls, real events. Perceptions therefore become the key to reality. (38) --Lynn Hershman
It seems to me there is a great confusion between what we understand to be reality and what we understand to be actuality. Despite imbrications at some level, each is quite distinct in what it designates. The three "selves" identified in ISSs can be said to belong to the order of reality as the states of consciousness described attest to, but only one, the first self, properly belongs to the order of actuality. The fact that something is really occurring does not necessarily mean that it is actually occurring. As far as aesthetic representations go, the power of an imaginary interference may temporarily mask this fact, but is unable to sustain the illusion over protracted periods of time. ISSs elicit an imaginary response from the participant who seeks to briefly blur these distinctions while interacting with his telesexual fantasy. It is of paramount importance to recall that, despite semantic differences, reality and actuality are perceived with the same perceptual machinery and as the participant of the ISS uses his imagination to oscillate between these registers the potential for an imaginary residue staining his perception of actuality remains a possibility. If we factor in the pedagogical capabilities of the simulator form we are led to conclude (and compelled to reiterate) that in spite of an inability to sustain a blurred demarcation between reality and actuality outside of virtuality, one may respond at some level of consciousness to actual stimuli as they might real stimuli (Homology Hypothesis).
The spectatorial experience of "interactive" sexuality in cyberspace presents palpable consequences to the participant's actual experience of sexual interaction by divesting it of intersubjective tactility and elevating an onanistic imaginary to the level of ultra-realism, and so an end to the resistance of physical contact, an end to the seduction of sexuality and to the gestures and expressions of desiring bodies--and as Chris Marker noted "... if the desiring body ceases to exist for the Other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied;" an unwitting prediction of the fate of sexual bodies in cyberspace. Marker's "wound" signifies the absence of an actual Other for whom one is desirable and virtual sexuality does the job of inflicting this wound, then cauterizing it in the glow of the interface.
Kevin Wynter is a Ph.D student at the University of California, Berkeley where he holds a Chancellor's Fellowship in the Department of Rhetoric. Current research interests include: Contemporary Pornography, David Lynch and 70s Exploitation cinema.
Notes
1 Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. London: Verso, 1997. p. 104
2 Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the "Frenzy of the Visible." Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. p. 306.
3 What is meant here by "active look" is a participatory mode of vision where looking and acting are conjoined contra the classical model of moving-image spectatorship and its looking/passivity dichotomy. Here what the viewer sees relies entirely on the (inter)action he wishes to take. The term "solicited gaze" should be understood as the explicit appeal of the spectacle for the viewer to marry his vision with the vision of his avatar through an interplay of spatial strategies of approximation and proximity.
4 See Michael Heim's The Cyberspace Dialectic.
5 Hershman, Lynn. "The Fantasy Beyond Control." The New Media Reader. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. p. 646
6 Williams, Hard Core. p.39
7 Ibid
8 Ibid
9 Walter Benjamin's term borrowed from his watershed essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
10 Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. New York: Penguin Books, 1977. p. 60
11 Writing in 1990, Hershman perspicaciously noted that, "Creating a truly interactive work demands that it exist on a mass scale, available and accessible to many people." A decade later, ISS's would bring her vision to fruition.
12 Williams, Hard Core. p. 312
13 In both series of ISS the "money" shots are simulated. This presents a strange twist to Williams' assertion that the money shot "is the ultimate guarantor of visual pleasure." With virtual sex we find a subversion of this staple principle in porn theory: the counterfeit money shot. The come shot is no longer the verifiable measuring stick of externalized sexual pleasure--here many of the come shots are reproduced. All that is necessary now is a simulated approximation of the original expulsion of fluids.
14 We do not discount the possibility of female or transgender viewers of ISS (the latter offering an interesting conundrum in the context of this discussion), but questions regarding these spectatorial looks are beyond the parameters of this paper.
15 Deleuze's term used to describe, for example, the "disconnected" or "empty" spaces of postwar Europe and postwar European cinema.
16 Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. p. 204
17 The question raised here involves the roles played by sense-memory and sense-data, where the memories of the participant's actual experience of the space of the virtual environment and the sum of his intersubjective sexual encounters coalesce.
18 Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media. p. 204
19 The objects constituting the spaces of the My Plaything ... series, though somewhat resonant in their significations (ex. ruler + chalkboard + desk with an apple on it =[signifies] school) are unable to signify on equal ground with the spectacle of sexuality it backdrops. Our earlier invocation of Deleuze's 'any-space-whatever' lends credence to this hypothesis.
20 Rolfe, J.M, K.J Staples, eds. Flight Simulation. London: Cambridge University Press, 1986. p. 3
21 In flight simulation, for example, one might appropriate our use of types and subsets to refer to 'Landing' (Type) and subsequently 'In the Dark,' 'In the Rain.' etc. (Subsets).
22 Burns, Ryan Joseph. Male Internet Pornography Consumers and Their Attitudes Toward Men and Women. University of Oklahoma (Ph.D dissertation), 2001. (Based on an article by: Barry Brummett. "The Homology Hypothesis: "Pornography on the VCR," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5 (1988): 202-216.)
23 Quote taken from the back cover of the DVD for Digital Sin's My Plaything: Gauge (2001).
24 Tart, Charles T. States of Consciousness. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1975. p. 95
25 Ibid.
26 Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality applications would be better suited to the task of creating immersive environments than a simulator.
27 Williams, Hard Core. p. 307
28 Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Imaginary. London: Routledge, 2004 (1940).
29 Quote taken from online encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
30 We acknowledge a third dimension to proprioception that suggests the brain is hardwired with a preexisting "neuromatrix," or map of the body in which "second nature" is assumed a priori. Intercourse may very well belong to this "neuromatrix," but we believe it is outside the parameters of this study.
31 Virilio. Open Sky. p. 66
32 Williams, Hard Core. p. 312
33 Taken from a lucid dreamer's journal entry entitled "Perfect Nothingness" posted here: http://www.ramalila.net/Adventures/Dreamers/gv_perfect.htm
34 Italics mine.
35 Linda Williams describes a corporealized observer as, "the body of the observer becom[ing] the body observed." Quote taken from her essay Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the "Carnal Density of Vision." P. 37.
36 Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London: Verso, 1989. A paragraph cited from p. 81.
37 Berger, p. 56.
38 Hershman, The Fantasy Beyond Control. p. 647
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| Author: | Wynter, Kevin |
|---|---|
| Publication: | CineAction |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Mar 22, 2007 |
| Words: | 6987 |
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