*Trigger warning* This thesis contains sexually explicit imagery.

WIRED FINGERS, STICKY KEYBOARDS:

TECHNO-EMBODIMENT IN ONLINE PORNOGRAPHY

Research Master Thesis

Goda Klumbytė

Media and Performance Studies

Utrecht University

First reader: Prof. Maaike Bleeker

Second reader: Dr. Kathrin Thiele

August, 2013

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Contents

INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 4

Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................................ 9

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A BODY? EMBODIMENT IN PORNOGRAPHY AND MEDIA STUDIES ........................................................................................................................................ 9

1.1. Embodiment and pornography: wars, speech and practice .................................................. 10

Anti-pornography and anti-censorship feminism: laying out the basics of pornography as

practice and speech/discourse paradigms .............................................................................. 12

The “Practice Paradigm”: Mason-Grant's embodied approach to pornography ................... 16

1.2. Embodiment and media technologies: incorporating “the other” ......................................... 19

Don Ihde's phenomenology of technology .............................................................................. 20

Mark Hansen: fusing body-technology-world ........................................................................ 24

1.3. Focussing on relations: pornography as dispositif ............................................................... 26

Chapter 2 ...................................................................................................................................... 31

EMBODIMENT IN ONLINE PORNOGRAPHY: PORNOGRAPHIC DISPOSITIF AND THE PRODUCTION OF BODY IN E-PORN ........................................................................................ 31

2.1. The Dispositif of Online Porn ............................................................................................. 35

The Basic Apparatus ............................................................................................................. 35

Mode of Address .................................................................................................................... 42

Viewing Situation .................................................................................................................. 46

2.2. Body in e-Porn: enacting the desires of mediated flesh ....................................................... 49

Chapter 3 ...................................................................................................................................... 51

MATTER RE-CONFIGURED: FROM BODY IN E-PORN TO THE POLITICS OF TECHNO-EMBODIMENT ........................................................................................................................... 51

3.1. Posthumanist take on the body: re-defining matter and information .................................... 53

3.2. Techno-embodiment in online porn: media, porn and politics ............................................. 57

The informational flows of vulnerability ................................................................................ 58

Towards the affirmative politics of sexual technobodies ......................................................... 61

CONCLUSION. FOR THE ETHICS OF WORKING WITH/IN ..................................................... 68

BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................... 72

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to a number of people who made this thesis possible and supported me throughout

the years of studying in Utrecht.

First of all, I am deeply grateful to my supervisor Maaike Bleeker and my second reader Kathrin

Thiele for being an inspiration not only to take up this project in the first place, but also to stick

with it till the end. I would not have made it without your professional support and understanding.

My gratitude also goes to my dear friend Lina Žigelytė: your insights and comments were

invaluable, yet no less than all the conversations (on porn and theories, on desires and politics, and

– of course – on life in itself) that I had the joy to engage in with you.

I would also like to thank my friends in and outside of the classroom: Mari, Virginia, Martina, Inga,

Domitilla, Sarah, Noor and all of you, who made my life a bit less wired and a bit more sticky.

To my mother and my brother I am grateful for unconditional support no matter what I ventured

into (even if sometimes you would think I am too much of an “angry feminist” for your taste).

And finally, to Eva – for being there.

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INTRODUCTION

Sometimes I get the sensation that I’m actually having sex with my Mac, holding it between my legs,

which tremble with the imminent orgasm, with the keyboard impregnated by my flow.

María Llopis, Revising Gender Roles and Stereotypes Through Art and Technology

The Guardian commentator Martin Robbins has labelled contemporary debates on censorship and

sexually explicit imagery on the Internet as “porn panic” (Robbins, 2012). The knee-jerk responses

from anti-porn activists come together with passionate calls for a better moral judgement, pleading

to protect children from degrading influence of online pornography and shelter women from

insulting representations of them as insatiable sluts. The carnality-invoking discourse that labels

porn as “dirty,” “disgusting,” and threatening to “healthy” sexuality point to the fear of alterations

and invasion of the body by the perverse power of the technological and the excessive. As more

countries are starting to implement or at least consider banning online pornography (for instance,

UK, Iceland and Germany), I believe the question of the relation between the body, pornography

and technology is an urgent one. Thus in my thesis I wish to explore the interconnections between

embodiment and technology through online pornography. To do that I first would like to outline

several disciplinary contexts in which this question is situated and that will frame my analysis.

First of all, there is a context of feminist debates on pornography, both academic and public. Late

1970s and 1980s witnessed a clash of feminist attitudes towards sexuality, sexual representation and

pornography both in academic and legal fields. This clash achieved names such as feminist sex wars

or porn wars, and roughly coincided with the growing interest in pornography research among

feminists in general. While anti-porn feminists, like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon,

argue that pornography entails objectification of and violence against women (for example,

Dworkin, 1981), pro-porn feminists (also often called sex-positive feminists) seek for sources of

women's empowerment in the very same images.

It is through the image and its discursive connotations that pornography is often approached

academically – research concentrates on the content of pornography, analysing the visual narratives,

filming techniques and subject positions that they provide. This approach seems to be in line with

the somewhat common sense of what pornography is: in the end, it is the sexual and explicit nature

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of the image that qualifies it as pornographic. However, some feminists, especially those from anti-

pornography movement, claim that pornography is firstly a corporeal practice that embodies

oppression and sexualization of violence. These two attitudes towards porn constitute two

paradigms: “pornography as speech/discourse” and “pornography as practice”, both entailing a

different account of the affectivity of pornography (i.e. the question of how pornography affects the

viewer) and therefore its subversive potentials and limitations.

However, much as important the content of pornography is, it must be taken into account that

pornography could not exist before sex became mediated – expressed in text, paintings, pictures or

videos. While scholars approaching pornography as discourse seem to do better justice to the

mediated nature of pornography (Williams, 1989; Gaines, 2004; Gillis, 2004; Patterson, 2004;

Jacobs et.al., 2007), those who analyse pornography as practice put the question of media aside

(Dworkin, 1981; Mason-Grant, 2004; Dines et al., 1998). Since the pro-pornography camp seems to

have gained solid ground and pornography is becoming more and more acceptable culturally,

leading to proliferation of alternative sexually explicit imagery and a true explosion of porn

websites, I believe what is rendered understudied is the possibilities that lie in the “practice”

approach that would take medium-specificity into account.

Thus we come to the second context, which is media and technology studies. In this field of study

there seem to be two broad approaches to technology and media: representationalist and embodied

approach. Media philosopher Mark Hansen in his phenomenological account on technology in

Bodies in Code argues that virtual reality has often been seen from a representationalist standpoint

(Hansen, 2006). Basically this type of approach makes a distinctive split between reality and virtual

reality, where the latter comes to represent the former, often “improving” the imperfections of the

“physical world”. Likewise, technology in general is then seen more as a prosthesis in a very

simplified way: we incorporate technologies only so much as to operate in place of sense organs,

but not change the way of experiencing.

While traditional accounts of cyberspace have often centred on freeing the mind from the prison of

the body, more contemporary virtual reality projects aim at placing the body as a primary point of

access to the virtual. Contrary to the representationalist approach, body and embodiment, according

to Hansen, not only serve as primary access to the lifeworld, but also are that through which

technology connects and makes impact on it (ibid.). This also has implications for choosing the

object of analysis: while representations are, of course, important, what is left understudied is the

practices of media consumption and how these practices engage the body.

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At the first glance this representationalist versus embodied approach, seemingly linked with the

pornography as speech/discourse versus practice discussion, comes down to the usual

matter/discourse dualism. As numerous feminist thinkers have shown, the world we live in is both –

it is material-semiotic, to use Donna Haraway's terms (Haraway, 1991), or material-discursive, to

follow Karen Barad's line (Barad, 2007). I do not wish to make my choices in the either/or

framework, nonetheless, I do believe that it is of academic and political importance to highlight the

embodied approach to technology, especially in contemporary technoculture where discourses of

virtual reality as a highly disembodied space still thrive. Thus I will situate my analysis in this

particular field of technology studies, employing concepts of phenomenology to highlight the

experiential and fleshy side of the digital.

However, the emerging post-human(ist) thought calls to re-think our notions of the human, body

and embodiment – and this is the third relevant context. While phenomenological analyses of

technology (for instance, Don Ihde's, but also Hansen's work) do focus on embodiment and how it

changes the moment human bodies encounter technology, they are criticized for often staying

within the body-as-organism perspective (Clough, 2010). That is to say, they take human body as a

system which can incorporate and respond to technologies but stay away from the question of what

counts as a body in the first place, as well as from the question of anthropocentrism that might be

inherent in their assumptions. With biology going computational, experience becoming mediated at

almost every step of everyday life, machines becoming smarter and economy capitalising on

affects, the lines between flesh and data are increasingly blurred, and there is a need for new

conceptual tools to account for paradoxical outcomes of this blurring (Braidotti, 2013).

Given these three complex contexts, I want to weave together pornography studies, media theories

of body-technology relation and posthumanist thought in order to produce a material-discursive

analysis of embodiment within the field that uses body both as its tool and as its addressee. The

question that will guide me through this thesis is the following: what exactly happens in the

moment of consumption of online pornography and how does it affect its human consumer? As I

have mentioned above, the way this question is answered has direct implications to how we

understand the affectivity of porn, and thus also what kind of politics do we build around it

(prohibition? censorship? using porn for subversion?).

My working hypothesis is that online pornography is affective and effective not only because it

contains sexually explicit imagery but also because of the specific aspects of technology and the

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way it is engaged during the consumption of online porn. There is a different position that my

embodied self occupies when I watch short videos on porn “tube websites,” being endlessly

bombarded by multiple images, pop-up ads, having to actively browse and click, and generally

constantly move through that peculiar space – a position quite different from watching a full-

featured “Deep Throat” movie on a TV screen or in the cinema. Throughout the work I will show

how this specific phenomenon of online porn consumption has something to do with body-

technology relation in which the organic/inorganic, body/environment, human/non-human

boundaries are blurred, as well as what implications does it have for pornography and media

studies.

The thesis will be structured in three parts. Firstly, I will discuss the embodied approach in the

fields of media and pornography that will serve as a primary theoretical basis of my analysis.

Starting with an outline of the pornography debate within the pro/anti and speech/discourse versus

practice approach, may aim will be to highlight the advantages of both camps and move to

introducing Joan Mason-Grant's embodied approach to pornography as practice that aims to explain

the incorporation of discourses into the lived realities. Afterwards I will turn to analysing the

embodied approach within the field of media studies, mostly using Mark Hansen's

phenomenological thought that is focused on body tactility and motility. At the end of this chapter I

will propose a framework that focuses on relations between different elements of mediated practices

and how they engage embodiment, without necessarily confining my analysis to any specific type

of representations – a framework that can be called a theory of pornography as dispositif.

The second chapter will be dedicated to engaging with the question of embodiment in online

pornography. I will analyse the three basic elements of pornographic dispositif: the basic apparatus,

mode of address and viewing situation. While discussing these, I will also pay attention to the

discourses that they are embedded in. Then, based on Hansen's concept of the body in code, I will

develop the concept of body in e-porn: a body whose sexuality is realised in conjunction with media

technologies. I will ask questions such as how does this body come into being, what animates this

body-technology coupling and what implications does it have for the embodied position of the

consumer, media theory and pornography research. My analysis that will allow me to develop the

concept of body in e-porn will be focused on examples of porn tube sites (such as YouPorn.com,

PornTube.com and the like) and the corporeal engagement with technology through multi-

dimensional movement (movement of the bodies on the screen, movement of the user in virtual

reality and movement of the affected body of the user) and touch (touch of the image, of the

hardware, and self-touch of the user).

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In the third chapter I will explore the body in e-porn from the perspective of posthuman(ist)

thought. The guiding question for this chapter is the politics and modes of power that operate in the

realm of online pornography, and what kind of spaces of constraint and potential do they open up

for consumers and producers. By relying on works of Brian Massumi, Donna Haraway, Rosi

Braidotti and other posthuman(ist) thinkers, I will first outline how the concept of body and

embodiment shifts in the posthuman condition, as well as how this shift challenges the

phenomenological body-as-organism perspective. I will show that posthuman bodies are re-defined

as technobodies. This definition will allow me to re-think body in e-porn as a particular kind of

relational form which a technobody acquires by engaging in the practices of online pornography. I

will dedicate the biggest part of the third chapter to the political threats and potentials of techno-

embodiment in online porn, looking for alternative lines of affirmative ethics. Finally, I will also ask

what kind of political as well as academic implications does it pose for how we are to make sense of

phenomena such as “porn addiction”, “rape tubes”, but also what kind of new opportunities does it

open for pornography that would be subversive of socially accepted gender and sexuality norms.

Finally, a point about methodology. My methodological approach is situated at the intersection of

phenomenology and discourse analysis. In line with phenomenological approach, I will talk of

experiences and bodily practices pertaining to the use of internet pornography. It will also allow me

to put a highlight on the concrete, lived embodiment as well as embodiment as a site of resistance

All this is underlined by a discursive approach in order to do justice to the material-semiotic nature

of reality and embodied life. What is important to note, however, is that I do not wish to engage in a

detailed analysis of the content of pornography (which has been done numerous times in porn

research), neither do I want to produce empirical research of the consumption of pornography

(which is attempted by researchers in sociology, psychology and other disciplines). Rather, I want to

analyse that what is “beyond” the content, a sort of “meta-data” of internet pornography, which is

the very medium specific structures of its consumption, presupposing a certain “ideal” viewing

situation. For that matter, the concept of dispositif and the use of figurations as conceptual thinking

tools seem to be appropriate.

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Chapter 1

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A BODY? EMBODIMENT IN

PORNOGRAPHY AND MEDIA STUDIES

In this chapter I will first explore how the question of embodiment figures in the field of

pornography and media and technology studies. Before going further, however, I would like to

briefly outline what I mean by the term “embodiment”, in order to have some basic ground upon

which I will build my argument throughout this and other chapters to follow.

The concept of embodiment itself refers to the experience and the process of living body. Whereas

the term “body” denotes a biological entity, a body-as-object and what in phenomenology is called

the “third person perspective” of “having a body”, embodiment describes the state of “being a

body”. This body-as-lived state is inextricably related to specificity of socio-cultural context as well

as to physiological particularities (Hayles, 1999), already pointing to the entanglement of discourse

and matter, to the politicality of the body-as-lived. Embodiment thus is entangled with personal

experience (which is the focus of phenomenology), but also material conditions of one's situation,

in other words – specific location in time, space and discourse. When that location is taken into

consideration, embodiment can be studied as a dynamic process of living a body, and opens up the

possibility to ask the question about how this process is affected by body coming into relation with

other objects, bodies, and processes.

Embodiment, the way I understand and use the term, points to two important notes on related terms.

Firstly, embodiment is inextricably related not only to lived experience, but also to materiality of

the body and its sensorium (Hansen, 2006). The latter includes not only the five senses but also

overall body motility and proprioception. A second important implication of embodiment, in that it

is precisely not only a state of being but also a process, is its implicit reference to enaction.

Embodiment itself could be defined as an enactment, a realization of body and its capacities. This

focus on what a body can and does do, as well as on enactment in general will be explained in

greater detail in the chapter to follow.

Secondly, I see embodiment as inextricably relational and this is a provisionary statement that I will

elaborate on throughout the whole thesis. Instead of it being a fixed category, I appropriate Thurtle

and Mitchell’s conceptualization of embodiment as an open-ended circuit diagram (Mitchell and

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Thurtle, 2004). According to them, it is a useful conception because “it delineates a larger network

of potential communicative experiences on multiple conceptual levels: it allows for conception of

difference beyond simple binary distinctions (circuits, for instance, may have multiple components)

and it suggests the integrity of the individual component (as a body itself) while recognizing its

context as a linked entity (in a body immanent on a different existential scale)” (ibid, 5). This point

will be discussed in greater detail in the last chapter of this thesis.

A side note also needs to be made here on affect and affectivity. “Affectivity” in the context of my

research means the modes of how pornography affects its viewer/consumer. Affect, however, is a

more complicated concept. Even though I will not directly engage with theories of affect, I would

like to note that whenever this concept will show up, it should be read in a way proposed by Patricia

T. Clough: as body's capacity to act, to affect and be affected (Clough, 2010). It is not the same as

agency, however, since it is a pre-individual, open-endedly social (Massumi, 2011) force that cannot

be easily reduced to emotions or constrained to trigger-response scheme. Affect thus points to the

field of forces and relations across the human and the non-human. It is a force that cannot be

consciously “grasped,” and yet it can have very material effects that manifest as felt intensities

(Massumi, 2011). As such, then, affect cuts through the organic/inorganic, body/technology

dualisms, and provides the grounds to think about body and embodiment as relational.

In pornography the question of embodiment comes into picture quite often through the question of

how pornography affects its viewers, and especially its female viewers. It was what pornographic

images supposedly made the bodies feel or do that intrigued and troubled anti-porn feminists. The

same question intrigued sex-positive feminists, too, albeit their research yielded results that pointed

to porn's potentials and not only constraints. In media and technology studies embodiment is

significant as a primary medium of experience but also as a field of interventions for the new

technologies (Wegenstein, 2010). Finally, embodiment is also at the heart of methodological

approaches to pornography and media, a point of focus in research and theory. And it is precisely

these embodiment-centred approaches that I will discuss in the following pages.

1.1. Embodiment and pornography: wars, speech and practice

Late 1970s and 1980s witnessed a clash of feminist attitudes towards sexuality, sexual

representation and pornography both in academic and legal fields. This clash achieved names such

as feminist sex wars or porn wars, and roughly coincided with the growing interest in pornography

11

research among feminists in general. The debate – both activist and theoretical – was centred mostly

around the question of how pornography affects its viewers and what legal and political measures

are to be taken, if any. Anti-pornography feminists claimed that pornography feeds into

subordination of women by men. Speculations were made on whether watching pornography

encourages men to commit rape, whether “pornography is the theory, rape is the practice” (Morgan,

1974), and many anti-porn feminists argued for the introduction of censorship or other forms of

legal responsibility of porn producers (Dworkin and MacKinnon, 1988).

Another response in this debate came from the side of feminists who voiced arguments of anti-

censorship or anti-anti-pornography. The movement emerged as a response to a response: it was

more in reaction to anti-pornography feminists that others started debating the question of porn in

general (Simons, 1972; Burstyn, 1985). Claims were made ranging from opposition to relying on

state-regulation (pornography is problematic but censorship is not the solution), highlighting that

anti-porn feminists (involuntarily, perhaps) are becoming strange bed-fellows with right-wing

politicians, to theoretical arguments that anti-porn feminists' assumptions and logics were simply

flawed (Cornell, 1995; Williams, 1989).

Sex-positive feminism constituted yet another voice in the feminist “sex wars”. Coming not least

from porn producers and workers themselves (such as Nina Hartley and Annie Sprinkle), this strand

of feminists claimed that women should be able to express their desires and explore their sexuality

freely. They focused not so much on fighting the mainstream pornography industry head-on, but

rather on the need to produce different pornography, to create alternative representations. Thus ideas

such as “feminist pornography” or “women-friendly pornography” were introduced to the academic

discourse as well as the genre of porn.

All of these responses to the question of pornography and its presumed effects rely mostly on

analysis of pornographic images and what they represent. It is through the image and its discursive

connotations that pornography is often approached academically, too – research concentrates on the

content of pornography, analysing the visual narratives, filming techniques and subject positions

that they provide, and fantasies that they feed and respond to. This approach seems to be in line

with the somewhat common sense of what pornography is: in the end, it is the sexual and explicit

nature of the image that qualifies it as pornographic. However, some feminists, especially those

from anti-pornography movement, claim that pornography is firstly a corporeal practice that

embodies oppression and sexualization of violence. These two attitudes towards porn constitute two

paradigms: “pornography as speech/discourse” and “pornography as practice” - both entailing a

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different account of the affectivity of pornography and therefore its subversive potentials and

limitations.

Anti-pornography and anti-censorship feminism: laying out the basics of pornography as

practice and speech/discourse paradigms

Probably the most famous anti-porn campaigners were Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon.

One of the books to become the milestone of anti-pornography feminist argument was Dworkin's

Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981). In her work Dworkin analyses pornographic images

and texts, first describing them thoroughly and then connecting them to the wider socio-economical

context. She claims that pornography is an embodiment of masculine power over women and

patriarchal order in general. It sexualizes violence and subordination, thus perpetuating the same

power relations that it feeds upon. In other words, it teaches men that all women want sex and that

oppression and certain physical and/or psychological pressure are legitimate and justifiable. It

teaches women that their role is to be subordinate and that sexual interaction is about submitting

oneself.

Dworkin's analysis of pornography in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) is constructed

around the statement that pornography is oppressive and objectifying to women and is developed

through explicating how this oppression takes effect. She analyses pornographic representations,

which she identifies as misogynistic and objectifying. Representing women's oppression and

objectification, pornographic images re-instantiate what they represent through the practices of

viewing and masturbation. During these practices, Dworkin implies, men necessarily identify with

oppressive males and women identify with victimized females, and learn these respective roles by

repeatedly engaging with pornographic material.

Furthermore, consumption of pornography as well its production – two related pornographic

practices - are inserted into a wider socio-economic context, both feeding on the oppression present

in this context as well as strengthening it. As she claims, pornography is a literal – carnal –

embodiment of power relations: “The strains of male power are embodied in pornography's form

and content, in economic control of and distribution of wealth within the industry, in the picture or

story as thing, in the photographer or writer as aggressor, in the critic or intellectual who through

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naming assigns value, in the actual use of models, in the application of the material in what is called

real life (which women are commanded to regard as distinct from fantasy)” (Dworkin, 1981: 25).

Taking a very structural approach to porn, Dworkin sees it as a material “thing” as well as material

practice, that has almost immediate effects on the viewers and general structure of women's

oppression.

Dworkin's account has been criticized many times by pro-porn feminists for being reductive, for

putting women in the role of a victim, for denying any alternative interpretations of pornographic

imagery, and even for open misandry (for example, Burstyn, 1985; Segal & McIntosh, 1992). One

of the key anti-censorship feminist1 thinkers Linda Williams in her already classic book Hard Core:

Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989) tries to overcome this lack of attention to the

complexity of interpretative process, suggesting that pornography is a certain kind of discourse

about sex, and pornographic texts are always marked by insecurity of the subject, instability of

meaning and identification, even while they support and suggest certain meanings and

interpretations more than others.

Pornography, according to Williams, originates from the male gaze – a gaze whose quest is to find

out the “truth” about women's pleasure – and is based on the assumption that body is able to

“speak” the “truth” of one's subjectivity and sexuality. In that it builds on the assumed relation

between truth and sexuality, pornography can be traced to the urge to “speak sex” – an obsession to

talk about sex, to make the body confess it secrets. Pornography is a “certain mode of speaking

about the issues of sex” (and especially sexual difference) (Williams, 1989: 130), “the visual (and

sometimes aural) representations of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit, usually unfaked,

sexual acts with a primary intent of arousing viewers” (ibid.: 30). She highlights that “however

much hardcore may claims to be a material and visible thing, it is still fundamentally a discourse, a

way of speaking about sex” (ibid.: 229).

What Williams does here is criticize, on the one hand, taking pornography as “reality” and “truth”

of sex, and on the other hand, regarding this reality as fixed, as the only way sex can happen and as

leaving no space for different interpretations and identifications. This appeal to the “real”, according

to Williams, simply masks that porn is a discourse, a fantasy. It has inherent instabilities and no

matter how much it tries, it always fails to deliver the “real thing,” thus providing an alternative to

1 The difference between pro-porn and anti-censorship feminism is, as Gail Dines suggests, that the latter usually acknowledged the harm of pornography for women, yet were against the censorship measures suggested by radical anti-porn feminists (Dines, 2009).

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Dworkin's line of thought that claims porn to be “real” in that it instantiates oppression and

violence. In other words, Williams questions two main claims of Dworkin and early anti-porn

feminism more generally: that pornographic representations are always to be read as depicting

violence against, oppression and objectification of women; and that they have immediate and direct

effects on its viewers.

Of course, Williams does not deny that pornography has effects on the way sexuality and gender are

lived and experienced. Her claim that porn is a discourse must be read in a foucauldian way:

discourse is a complex psychic, technological and social apparatus that produces certain bodies and

subjects. In the case of pornography it is a discourse that fuses power, pleasure and knowledge, and

generates multiple effects: the fusion of body/world and reality/fantasy, the implantation of the

“perversions” of voyeurism and fetishism, the social construction of women's bodies as objects

rather than subjects of vision. In other words, pornography as discourse functions as an apparatus of

control that appeals to a particular fantasy (namely, the fantasy of “knowing” sex through “seeing

sex”, and deriving both pleasure and power from this knowledge), moulding its subjects into bodies

that act in accordance to its logic.

Williams' and Dworkin's accounts of pornography point to two distinctive approaches to the

question of not only what pornography is, but also what kind of effects it produces and how.

Dworkin's analysis forms the grounds of what is called the “practice” approach to pornography by

focusing on the consumption of porn and highlighting that it is first and foremost a set of material

practices, which affect the consumers through the repetitive engagement with pornographic

representations. Williams, on the other hand, seems to be paying more attention to the complex

discursive apparatus at play in pornographic representations themselves2, and highlights how these

representations are neither stable, nor all-encompassing, and the discursive power that they posses

is tacit and productive.

“Pornography as discourse” approach envelopes the more specific “pornography as speech”

attitude. Porn as speech approach is based on regarding images that represent certain notions of

sexuality and gender roles as language of expressing these notions. How they are interpreted

depends on the viewer and wider socio-cultural context – thus what they actually represent depends

2 It must be noted that Williams does, to some extent, talk about practices of viewing pornography when she talks about early stag films. However, it seems that she does not focus on these practices as at least one of the keys to what pornography is and how it affects us.

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on the discourses that they are caught up in3. “Pornography is speech” argument can be found both

in pro-porn and anti-porn thought, though pro-porn feminists seem to have been more keen to use it.

Especially in the anti-censorship camp feminists claimed that even though pornography is often

offensive for women, it is still a speech, a certain mode of representation, thus powerful, yet

different from direct oppression and violence (see Burstyn, 1985). Post-1980s feminists such as

Lynn Segal and Mary McIntosh are also concerned with representations as interpretable expressions

that can be nonetheless used as a canvas for “real” action (Segal and McIntosh,1992).

But the field where “pornography as speech” paradigm is employed the most is the legal debates.

For example, when MacKinnon and Dworkin drafted an ordinance that would have allowed people

to pursue legal measures against pornography, it was rejected precisely on the grounds of the the

First Amendment of the US Constitution as it would supposedly have been an infringement of the

freedom of speech. The legal framework thus puts pornography strictly on the side of “opinion” and

fantasy, that, even if offensive, cannot be taken as “real violence.” Popular culture also draws on

“reality” versus pornography distinction by highlighting that sexual practices in porn are not always

the ones that one should be enacting in “real life”4. In a way “porn as speech” argument, at least in

legal and popular debates, seems to work as a tool to make porn a no-big-deal by employing the

“sticks and stones will break your bones but words [and images] will never hurt you” kind of logic.

In this light, approaching porn more generally as a discourse does much more justice to the complex

cultural, institutional and phantasmic apparatus at work in this realm.

The difference between practice and discourse/speech approach in the theories outlined above,I

argue, boil down to the following: Williams puts more highlight on porn taking effect on lived

bodies and socio-cultural structures through discourse that appeals to certain fantasy (namely, the

fantasy of knowing and gaining pleasure from knowledge), while Dworkin claims that porn takes

effect on real bodies rather unconsciously through practice and repetition of this practice, through

learning to get aroused and masturbate to pornographic images by doing that. Because Dworkin

emphasizes the bodily practice of consumption and production of porn, thus suggesting that it has

3 A clarification of how I use the concepts of “image”, “representation”, “speech” and “discourse” might be useful

here. In the context of speech/practice distinction “image” seems to be the actual visual object, while “representation” is a process – images represent but for the viewer to see them as a representations there has to be some interpretation going on. I believe that interpretation and “just seeing” cannot be clearly discerned: seeing the image always to some extent comes with interpretation, it always is a representation of something, at least for the viewer - the image “speaks” to the viewer and if it speaks, it is a representation. So if representation involves interpretation, then representations are inextricable from discourses. This is the reason why I cluster (though do not put a sign of equality between) speech and discourse. So discourse, as a wider apparatus, in this context envelopes speech of visual representations as a mode of discursive expression.

4 For example, Don't Try This at Home -- Stuff Guys Want in Their Porn, Not Their Beds,

http://www.lemondrop.com/2010/04/28/pron-moves-dudes-don-t-like/ (accessed on 01 February 2012).

16

implications for how the body is lived and experienced outside of pornographic context, in the next

section I will take a closer look at the “practice approach” to pornography outlined by Joan Mason-

Grant, that pays a special attention to phenomenological experience of the body, and attempts to

explain how porn and its discourse takes effect on lived experience through incorporation.

The “Practice Paradigm”: Mason-Grant's embodied approach to pornography

The term “practice paradigm” was introduced by Joan Mason-Grant who in her book Pornography

Embodied (2004) tries to recover Dworkin's and MacKinnon's anti-pornography claims by stressing

what, according to her, has been overlooked in their thought: that pornography is regarded as

practice rather than speech. The meaning of the word practice here is two-fold. On the one hand, it

refers to the way pornography is used: Mason-Grant claims that pornography is practice because it

is used for sex – either sex as masturbation, or incorporating the use of pornography during or as a

prelude the the actual sexual encounter. On the other hand, it is practice because it is “an

irrevocably systemic phenomenon: any one pornographic 'act' always refers to others; this

relationality is central to what pornography is; and … the power of what pornographic materials

'say' … is not traceable to a single authoritative source or origin” (Mason-Grant, 2004: 79).

According to Mason-Grant, it is precisely this relationality, this constant reference to a larger

context where pornography derives its force from.

To enforce her argument Mason-Grant employs Judith Butler's notion of performativity and Drew

Lerder's phenomenological theory of incorporation through which social meanings and bodily

practices are rendered mutually engendering. According to Lerder, our daily functioning is based on

the so-called absence of the body, its imperceptible motility and operations. It is a context from

which agency – not the “I think” but rather “I can” - emerges, and at the heart of it lies the

irreducibly corporeal know-how. Lerder explains that this know-how is achieved through

incorporation to a bodily level. He gives an example of swimming: one can watch the swimmer,

then try out swimming oneself, but only when swimming becomes an activity that is not the focus

of one's mind anymore then it becomes a truly incorporated bodily knowledge. This transforms the

very structure of agency and subjectivity: it is no longer simply that my body is able to swim – I am

a swimmer. Such incorporated knowledge stays as an active force in the field of agency even if one

does not use it actively.

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In the same way one can incorporate objects and modes of behaviour: other human and non-human

animals as well as objects are part of our “phenomenological anatomy” (ibid.: 107). According to

Mason-Grant, the imperceptibility, a certain everyday “blindness” towards the body is necessary for

proper functioning. Drawing on Lerder she claims that bodies are least noticeable when they look

and act as everybody else's. We constantly relate to other people and groups, thus incorporation is a

process that takes place all the time. Butler's notion of performativity comes at hand when Mason-

Grant explains how social norms are incorporated just as any other skill on a bodily level: it is

through the constant performance of social norms that they become inscribed in the history and

presence of lived bodies, thus producing us as social subjects.

Likewise, according to Mason-Grant, with sexuality. Our sexual practices (understood more widely

than just intercourse and outercourse) become this tacit bodily know-how, and lays the grounds for

our (sexual) agency5. I quote her on this question at length: “over time, as a given form of sexuality

is acted out, rehearsed, it seeps into one's organismic ground, shaping sexual desire and pleasure,

shaping perception and expectation, and thereby shaping the way one interacts with others” (ibid.:

113). In this way we become not merely beings that have sex – we become sexual beings. Thus

using pornography for sex makes it a sexual practice that through reiteration, performativity and

reference to other sex/gender-defined practices fuses into the corporeal realm. Such an account

points to the affectivity (and perhaps effectivity) of pornography that takes its toll on a much less

conscious and much more material level. It also explains how pornographic modes of sex end up

being applied in “real life” sexual practices and provides the basis to support Dworkin's argument

that pornography is an embodied subordination of women.

Even though Mason-Grant points out that “incorporated practices” does not necessarily mean

“subordinating”, mainstream pornography, according to her, indeed is subordinating to women.

Thus seeing it and learning to “take off” on images of violence against and domination over women

affects women's and men's behaviour in “real life” situations towards other people. She does not

rule out the possibility of pornography that would not be subordinating, that would treat women

with respect and enable them to express their desires. Nonetheless, she still makes an argument

against pornography as such, claiming that by appealing to the visual (as opposed to the tactile and

other sensory modes) engagement with anonymous and controllable bodies it perpetuates

objectification and alienation that feeds into other sexual and non-sexual practices.

5 Mason-Grant even stresses that they produce sexual agency (ibid.: 113).

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Mason-Grant's account of pornography as practice introduces a point that is not so often analysed in

pornography research: the importance of physical engagement with pornographic images and the

apparatus of bodily incorporation of social norms that prevail these images. This encourages to

think about the limits of freedom of interpretation, of how the images are “read”, as well as shows

that this “reading” itself is not a solely conscious activity that takes place in one's mind – reading

images is no less corporeal. However, what it does not take into account is the specificity of the

media pornography employs. While scholars approaching pornography as discourse seem to do

justice to the mediated nature of pornography (Williams, 1989; Gaines, 2004; Gillis, 2004;

Patterson, 2004; Jacobs et al., 2007), those who analyse pornography as practice put the influence

of media aside (Dworkin, 1981; Mason-Grant, 2004; Dines et al., 1998). Yet mediation lies at the

very heart of pornography: it is images, texts, videos that one talks about when they talk about porn.

Not accounting for this renders Mason-Grant's analysis incomplete. Moreover, her claim that

pornography reduces sex to vision implies a somewhat simplified understanding of the visual and

ignores other elements of practice that are constitutive of the consumption of pornography.

***

To sum up, the whole pornography as practice versus speech/discourse debate can be situated along

two different axis. First of all, the proponents of practice approach, such as Dworkin and Mason-

Grant, seem to focus more on the effects of pornography on its embodied consumer and their socio-

cultural embeddings. This stance, as in Dworkin's case, for instance, is built on a certain assumption

about what do pornographic images represent and how are they to be interpreted. The

discourse/speech approach proponents in the mean-time try to pay a closer look at these

representations, prior (if at all) making arguments about what kind of effects these representations

might have. This does not mean that these two positions are necessarily in contradiction with each

other, and while they often are positioned in opposition, this oppositions is rather a result of the

intense political debates during sex-wars.

Having said that, I would also like to suggest that there seems to be a different position ascribed to

body and embodiment within these two strands of thought. The question of embodiment in practice-

based approach is rather central simply because it claims that pornography affects its viewer

precisely on and through the corporeal realm. Discourse/speech approach, on the other hand,

focuses on pornographic content, highlighting (at least this is what Linda Williams claims) that

pornography operates first and foremost through the realm of fantasy, thus its outcomes and effects,

some of which can be bodily, are never unequivocal.

The discursive approach to pornography seems to be much more prominent both in scholarship and

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in public debates, while practice approach stays somewhat understudied. Given that in practice

approach the body seems to be at the focus point, I wish to explore this particular approach further.

However, two important points must be made here: firstly, practice is not defined only by action as

such, but also relates to discourses that encourage and shape them. Secondly, because pornography

is a primarily medium-dependent phenomenon, it is crucial to ask how is the body and embodiment

accounted for in media studies and practices. Thus in the next section I will explore the relation

between media technologies and embodiment, especially in the phenomenological tradition in

media studies.

1.2. Embodiment and media technologies: incorporating “the other”

Body and embodiment enters the realm of media, and technologies more generally, in several

different ways. On the one hand, body itself – as an object, a natural “given” - is seen as a tool for

human mind to control, especially since Descartes (in)famously split the mind and the body with the

help of doubt. In that way it is the primary technological object, controlled by the subject that

“resides” in the mind. It is also the primary medium of experience of the world, providing

information for the rational mind to process and react to. On the other hand, the split between

organic/inorganic and nature/culture puts human body and technology on the opposite sides of these

divides. And yet in another light, it is often reiterated that what distinguishes human beings from the

rest of animal kingdom is precisely the ability to make and use technologies.

Technologies, then, also have an ambiguous status that reveals itself in a question of technological

non/determinism: technological objects are seen as simply tools produced and employed by

reasonable human subjects, yet at the same time the question is raised how much these tools affect

and shape human life. In the field of media studies Marshall MacLuhan famously argued that it is

the medium that is the message and its message is the change that it introduces into the human life.

However, he also saw media as being “extensions of man” in a sense that they enhance capabilities

of human body: the radio extends the ear, camera extends the eye and “electric media” extend

human nervous system itself (MacLuhan, 1964).

In the phenomenological tradition of thought the question of relation between embodiment and

technologies (and not just the question of body as an object and technology) has been receiving a

considerable amount of attention. The famous blind man's stick example was used by Maurice

Merleau-Ponty to argue that technologies can be incorporated in the very lived body (which is to

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say, embodiment) of a human being. Technologies through their use, Merleau-Ponty claims, become

part of our bodies and influences how we perceive and experience the environment. Don Ihde – one

of the authors whose ideas will be discussed in the following pages – contributed to this account by

pointing to how same technologies can be differently embodied in different socio-cultural contexts.

When it comes to new media and other digital technologies, the distinction between “immaterial

information” and fleshy body runs deep and solid, both in science (for instance, DNA research) and

popular culture (Mitchell and Thurtle, 2004). Cyberspace becomes a place to escape and leave “the

meat” behind – which was thoroughly criticized, among others, by feminist scholars who showed

not only that information is highly embedded and embodied (Hayles, 1999) but also that relations

and identities in cyberspace often-times replicated those of non-virtual life (Nakamura, 2002;

Turkle, 1995). In this section of the chapter, thus, I will discuss the theories of two media and

technology philosophers who argued for an embodied approach to technology from a perspective of

phenomenology6.

Don Ihde's phenomenology of technology

I would like to start by outlining the main ideas of philosopher Don Ihde, a prominent North-

American philosopher of technology. His academic path started from hermeneutics and led him

through science and technology studies to develop a brand of thought that he calls

“postphenomenology”. According to Ihde, phenomenology, having provided rigorous analyses of

human experience, arrived at the place in time when it has to renew itself in response to challenges

brought by modern sciences and technological expansion (Ihde, 2009). Postphenomenology is his

way of bringing phenomenology up to date, so to say, by coupling it with pragmatism. Borrowing

from John Dewey Ihde welcomes the pragmatist's instrumental and experimental approach to reality

and science, and proposes that phenomenology should engage in empirical analysis while taking

more thoroughly into account material (physical) as well as socio-cultural embeddedness of

experience.

6 I use the term “technology” as a general concept that includes technological artefacts as well as practices of their

use. I consider media as one of these artefacts and practices. New media, though the “newness” is debatable (see Bolter and Grusin, 2000), is used in this work to include digital technologies of information and communication. I will use the term “digital technologies” in a somewhat synonymous way, especially since the ubiquitous use of computers in very different fields (from entertainment to biological research) makes digital technologies universal machines. However, “new media” in the context of this thesis will mean digital technologies that relate more to the communication, entertainment and infotainment function, while “digital technologies” in general will be meant to encompass both the latter and other digital technologies, the primary functions of which are linked to other uses.

21

One of these embeddings of experience is technological. In Ihde's account technology plays a

double role: it is part of human environment itself and at the same time acts as a mediator in the

human-environment interaction. According to Ihde, technologies arise from needs or natural

phenomena (for instance, clocks were developed in response to the need to measure time and maps

- to the need to account for the space) and at the beginning they serve quite simply as tools to

interact with environment. Yet gradually they become more autonomous and turn into devices that

shape these same natural phenomena, they become yardsticks against which these phenomena are

being measured (to use the same example, the clock eventually became quite independent from

actual rhythms of daylight) (Ihde, 1993). Thus technologies, when applied, also transform the way

humans relate to their environment and the environment itself.

But the effect of technologies does not end here: technologies-as-mediators also change humans

themselves, both hermeneutically (the way we interpret ourselves) as well as on a bodily level (the

way we live as embodied beings in the world). Technologies, according to him, are material-

discursive things, better yet – instruments, that are part of existential praxes, i.e. the ways we live

and relate to the world. In Existential Technics (1983) Ihde says: “all self-interpretation takes its

shape in a certain way with respect to some basic form of existential praxis which is projected upon

the world and reflected back in ways which have become the dominant ways to understand

ourselves and our world” (1983: 22, quoted in Selinger, 2006:96). This dominant way today is

technology. So Ihde's thought here makes a full hermeneutic circle: by relating to the world through

technologies we transform that relation as well as ourselves, and eventually also what we take as

“the world”, “environment” and “human”. This, then, is Ihde's relational ontology: human-

environment-technology co-constitute each other through relations.

Throughout several of his books, but most notably in Technics and Praxis (1979) Ihde claims that

there are three basic kinds of relations between humans and technologies: first, the embodiment

relations, which come into being when technology is taken into the bodily experience as a mediator

that shapes human encounter with their environment (like Merleau-Ponty's famous example of a

blind man and his stick)7. In this relation technology becomes transparent – it is a medium yet this

medium is effaced from experience as such. Hermeneutic relations arise when we encounter the

world through technology which has to be interpreted by the human to learn something about the

world (for instance, one has to read a thermometer to make findings about the temperature). Finally,

alterity relations characterize the type of relation in which technology is experienced as quasi-object

7 In his later work (2012) Ihde specifies that embodiment relations can entail incorporation, which is the case with technologies

that literally become part of the body, such as pacers or other kinds of implants.

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or even quasi-other. For instance, toys and robots would encourage precisely this kind of relation.

Ihde also notes that there can be background relations, which means simply that technology is part

of the environment, yet the three main relations remain embodiment, hermeneutic and alterity.

Let me zoom-in on the first kind of relation. Relations of embodiment and their effects depend on

the different uses of technology. Ihde explicates that through the method of variational analysis: he

looks at different variations of the same phenomenon involving the same kind of technology. For

instance, while analysing archery in different cultures Ihde notices that even though archery is a

common phenomenon across cultural contexts, there are several variations of archery that entail

different styles of shooting, the types of bow and possible bodily positions of the archer. (Ihde,

2009). These different combinations of bow+position+style is what Ihde calls “the structures of

multistability” (2009: 14). In other words, multistabilities are the possibilities to embody

technology in different ways and for different purposes (Rosenberger, 2009). This again highlights

the co-dependency of both human and technology as well as their entanglement in the socio-cultural

context.

When it comes to the effect of technology over embodied experience, Ihde suggests that technology

always operates in the double frame of magnification/reduction (Ihde, 1993). As a mediator,

technology enhances some bodily ability (for instance, vision) and thus reduces the rest. For

example, using a microscope entails magnification of the object – enhancement of vision – but at

the same time it reduces the environmental context of this object: the overall form of the object as

well as its relation to environment will be pushed to the background by focusing the lens on

molecules or atoms. This double process of magnification-reduction often leads to introducing

mechanisms of compensation. For instance, the impossibility of effectively introducing smell or

actual bodily movement to the cinema results in developing more sophisticated visualization and

audio techniques (3D and Dolby Surround, for instance) as well as using particular ways of filming

that would refer the images back to the embodied viewer (close-ups, certain camera angles, etc.).

Another important categorical distinction that pertains to effects of embodiment relations as well as

to how we embody objects is the distinction between “body one” and “body two”. “Body one”,

according to Ihde, is a sensory perception of the body “from within”, and “body two” – a socio-

culturally influenced image of the body (this seems to be the same kind of distinction that Merleau-

Ponty makes between body schema and body image). In his discussion of virtual bodies (1998) Ihde

employs these two concepts to account for the difference between Real Life (RL) and Virtual

Reality (VR). According to Ihde VR bodies operate from the perspective of body two – an “outside

23

perspective” on the body – and despite all the technological attempts to make VR appeal to body

one, it is still less immersive than RL is. In his own words, “VR 'bodies' are thin and never attain the

thickness of the flesh” (1998: 357). These “different bodies” also point to the conditions for

embodiment relations to arise: even though objects can become part of the “body two” (one can

incorporate a walking stick or an artificial limb to their (self)image), they can be truly embodied

only when they become part of “body one”8.

There are a couple of aspects of Ihde's philosophy of technology that are important in the context of

this analysis. Firstly, the empirical-experimental approach, which highlights, contrary to more

“traditional” phenomenological analyses, not only subjective experience but also the very practices,

physical engagement with technology and the material and socio-cultural embeddedness of these

practices. Indeed, in some cases it might be important to move away from understanding technology

and media as “things” or “institutions” but rather to pay attention to the practices of media, to take

media themselves as practice, as Nick Couldry suggests (Couldry, 2004). Even though Ihde himself

does not seem to go as far as to claim that technologies themselves are practices, his philosophy of

structures of multistability open up a possibility to see technologies in a less deterministic and fixed

way.

Second important aspect is the hermeneutic circle of interpretation. Ihde tries to go beyond

technological determinism and social constructivism, relying rather on the circle of influence:

people produce technologies but technologies, once in use, affect their users, the context in which

they operate (environment becomes technological environment) and experience of this context

(through magnification/reduction and compensation mechanisms).

However, Ihde's account of virtual reality and its relation to embodiment seems to thin-out the

complexity of cyberspace and experience of digital technologies. Furthermore, Ihde's embodied

human seems to become the measuring stick – it is their biological embodiment that is a natural

“zero point” to which technological and social environment introduces changes. To provide a more

detailed account of embodiment-technology relation as well how embodiment plays into the field of

new media, in the next section I will discuss philosopher's Mark Hansen's ideas of fusing body-

technology-world.

8 Of course, this does not mean that “body two” cannot affect the “body one”: there is often an overspill between the two and in

lived experience it can be quite hard to maintain the distinction, as critics have shown (Scharff, 2006).

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Mark Hansen: fusing body-technology-world

Media philosopher Mark Hansen in his phenomenological account of technology in Bodies In

Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (2006) argues that virtual reality has often been seen from a

representationalist standpoint. Basically this type of approach makes a distinctive split between

reality and virtual reality, where the latter comes to represent the former, often “improving” the

imperfections of the “physical world”9. Likewise, technology in general is then seen more as a

prosthesis in a very simplified way: we incorporate technologies only so much as to operate in place

of sense organs, but not change the way of experiencing. I would also add that this type of

representationalist discourse is well established in contemporary media landscape, especially media

that aim at representations of “real life”. For instance, social media, such as Facebook, are seen to

be “extensions” of “real” relationships, activities and identities as users are encouraged to use their

true names, document their leisure and work activities, and so on.

While traditional accounts of cyberspace have often centred on freeing the mind from the prison of

the body, more contemporary virtual reality projects aim at placing the body as a primary point of

access to the virtual. Taking these new virtual reality projects as examples, Hansen argues for an

embodied approach to the virtual and technology in general. Contrary to the representationalist

approach, body and embodiment, according to Hansen, not only serves as a primary access to the

lifeworld, but also is that through which technology connects and makes impact on it. Body, being

the gateway to the world, naturalizes modifications brought by technical developments, and at the

same time opens up the opportunity for these modifications to deterritorialize body's habitual

interaction with the world and possibly also expand it.

This deterritorialization and expansion is made possible by the coupling of body and technics – this

is a claim that pertains to not only the status of technology, but also to the way embodiment and

body is understood and felt in general. According to Hansen, representationalist approach reduces

virtual reality technologies to mere extensions, and implies that the body is felt first and foremost

through the body-image (or what Ihde calls “body one”): a sort of medium between the “inside” and

“outside. Criticizing body-image as a “primarily visual apprehension of the body as an external

object” (Hansen, 2006: 39), Hansen argues that body image is actually derivative from the body

schema. Body schema is a primary framework within which the body feels itself and gains access to

the world. According to Merleau-Ponty, on whose theory Hansen builds his work, it is a “flexible,

9 Think, for example, of the aforementioned desire to “leave the meat behind” as an unnecessary burden.

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plastic, systemic form of distributed agency encompassing what takes place within the boundaries

of the body proper (the skin) as well as the entirety of the spatiality of embodied motility” (ibid.:

38).

This body schema (or “body two” in Ihde's terms) emerges from the operational perspective of the

embodied organism, that is to say, it has everything to do with motility and tactility as the primary

sense. It gives priority to the internal perspective of the organism, yet by doing that it opens the

door for body-technology coupling, as it includes also what is “outside” of the organism by

focusing on movement, on embodied enaction. To put it simply, technics can be incorporated in our

“phenomenological anatomy” through us interacting with them. Hansen claims that this interaction

is not a mere relation between two defined entities, but puts the technical “at the heart of human

motility” (ibid.: 39). This has consequences for how we, so to say, move around the world, how we

feel our bodies, and fosters the general indivision of body-technology-world, enabling Hansen to

develop an embodied, motor-centric approach to virtual reality.

At the core of this approach lies the concept of body in code: body, who's potential is unearthed or

enacted with the help of technology. Hansen writes: “[b]y this I do not mean a purely informational

body or a digital disembodiment of the everyday body. I mean a body submitted to and constituted

by an unavoidable and empowering technical deterritorialization – a body whose embodiment is

realized, and can only be realized, in conjunction with technics” (ibid.: 20). To unveil these bodies-

in-code, Hansen focuses not only on movement, but also on touch. Together with Merleau-Ponty he

claims that touch is the primary sense, the basis for the sensible per se. The visual, then, is but an

expansion of the primary sensibility of touch beyond the boundaries of the skin, which is in contrast

with understanding of visual pleasure as an alienating pleasure that seems to be implied by Mason-

Grant.

Hansen's philosophy also introduces affect as an interface between media and body (Hansen, 2004).

For Hansen affect is “the capacity of the body to experience itself as 'more than itself' and thus to

deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new” (Hansen,

2004: 7). New media, defined more as processes rather than “things”, open up the body's creative

potential by putting it in the circuit of information as an embodied processor of this information.

Affect, then, becomes an interface via which the body in-forms the digital. And even though

Hansen's account falls short of fully enforcing the understanding of embodiment as an open

circuitry diagram, which I mentioned in the introduction, it allows for the overspills and much

26

tighter connections between embodiment and technology10.

To summarize, this embodied motor-centric approach, at the heart of which lies the practices of

movement and the sensibilities of touch, has a manifold potential. Firstly, it withdraws from the

omnipotence of the visual and puts the body to the fore as that through which we gain access to the

world and, likewise, to technology. By this it draws attention to the practices, to the way we engage

with objects and environments on a very physical, material level. Secondly, it posits the body and

embodiment as a source of creative potential that can be actualized through/with technology, thus

challenging the clear-cut lines of the organic/inorganic as well as the human/non-human. I will

argue that these two points are important as we come to account for and make sense of the practices

of internet pornography in the next chapter.

1.3. Focussing on relations: pornography as dispositif

Let me reiterate briefly some crucial points that have been made so far. Firstly, from the discussion

on pornography as speech/discourse versus pornography as practice it is quite clear that there is a

need to account both for material, bodily engagement with pornographic images, as well as specific

way these images address and affect the viewer. Secondly, since pornography is always a mediated

phenomenon, attention needs to be paid to the same elements (bodily engagement and address) of

the specific medium in the analysis of pornography. Thirdly, I tried to show that embodiment –

which is related to practice/enactment, body sensibility and motility – is a concept that is very

present both in pornography and in media/technology studies, and thus can serve as a common point

of focus in an analysis of pornography that takes medium-specificity into account. I would like to

suggest now that a theory of dispositif can serve as a good methodological tool to bring the above

lines of argument together, and provide a way to focus on the relations between all of them.

The concept of dispositif was popularized mostly through the work of Michel Foucault, and

especially his work on the history of sexuality. In English translations dispositif was usually

translated as “apparatus”, though other terms such as “deployment”, “arrangement” or even

“situation” can be also found11. For Foucault dispositif refers to: “firstly, a thoroughly

10 For a more detailed critique of Hansen's understanding of body and embodiment, see the last chapter of this thesis. 11 Many authors (for instance, Agamben, 2005; Kessler, 2006) have expressed doubts about the suitability of the

translation of dispositif as “apparatus”. Thus while the term “apparatus” is perhaps more widely accepted in English translations, it connotes rigidity and clear demarcations and for this reason in my thesis I will revert to using the original term dispositif.

27

heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory

decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and

philanthropic propositions–in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the

apparatus [dispositif – GK]. The apparatus [dispositif – GK] itself is the system of relations that can

be established between these elements” (Foucault, 1977: 194). So dispositif entails both discursive

and non-discursive elements as well as relations between them.

Further on, Foucault remarks that dispositif describes a particular nature of the relations between

multiple elements, which means that the same elements can be part of different dispositifs because

the relations between them will be different. Furthermore, these relations produce certain effects:

dispositifs always respond to some urgent need, they have a strategic function – in some way, they

are strategies of management. In this sense, dispositifs are historically contingent and engaged in a

close interplay with socio-cultural context. Foucault's understanding of dispositif also entails a

strong connection to power and knowledge. Because they produce certain effects, these effects feed

into power-knowledge structures and processes of subjectivation. Georgio Agamben sees this

relation between dispositif and power in quite negative light as capturing, constricting and

transforming living beings into subjects – it is a management strategy suffused with power

structures (Agamben, 2005).

However, the relations between elements that constitute a dispositif are never one-directional or

fixed. As Gilles Deleuze notes in his commentary essay “What is a Dispositif?” (1988), in a

somewhat more general account of the term, dispositif is a complex machine that entails “lines of

visibility and enunciation [i.e. what is rendered seen/unseen, speakable or not – GK], lines of force

[i.e. power – GK], lines of subjectification, lines of splitting, breakage, fracture, all of which criss-

cross and mingle together, some lines producing or giving rise to others, by means of variations or

even changes in the way they are grouped” (Deleuze, 1988: 162). In other words, dispositif “entails

a more sophisticated understanding of power – not merely domination but relational, strategic, and

always predicated on the structural possibility of resistance” (Coté, 2011: 385).

This affects not only how power is to be seen but also how does one account for effects of

dispositifs. According to Mark Coté (2011), there is always uncertainty and certain open-endedness

in what effect a dispositif might produce. Thus it is important to look not for unities or

universalities, but rather for singularities and possibilities for the new (Deleuze, 1988). Italian

media activist Bernardi a.k.a. “Bifo”, quoted in Coté, explains it beautifully: “For instance, a

technological device tends to produce certain effects. It is not mandatory, it is not unavoidable, but

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the television is producing an effect of conformism, passivity, and so on … It is a dispositif, a

machinic conglomeration working the flow, structuring things, creating some constant reactions,

and so on … So we can say that the television is a combinatory dispositif which is able to

standartize the generation of a certain kind of social composition. Foucault talks here of “variable

margins of uncertainty,” because the connection (l'agencement) between the dispositif and the

singularities it is going to produce is not deterministic and obviously foreseeable. In this field of

uncertainty … we find the freedom of political action” (Cote, 2011: 383).

In the field of media studies, the concept of dispositif has been introduced quite early by Jean-Louis

Baudry (1978) and laid the foundations for what became to be known as “apparatus theory” in film

studies. Again, though translated in English as “apparatus”, Baudry makes a distinction between the

“basic apparatus” and dispositif. “Basic apparatus” refers to technologies and operations necessary

to produce and project the film, while dispositif is a more general term to denote the arrangement of

these technological elements as well as specific viewing situation or position and mode of address

and a particular tendency (or effect) that this arrangement produces (Kessler, 2006). Frank Kessler

claims that for Baudry dispositif includes “1. a material technology producing conditions that help

to shape 2. a certain viewing position that is based upon unconscious desires to which corresponds

3. an institutionalised film form implying a form of address trying to guarantee that this viewing

position … functions in an optimal way” (Kessler, 2006: 61).

As we can see from the above, Baudry's dispositif is not much different from Foucault's, even

though Baudry seems to have been less focused on dimension of power. Nonetheless, the

subjectification line is present in Baudry's definition too: it is the form of address that creates a

viewing position (sometimes also called “viewing situation” or “subject position”) together with

basic apparatus, and therefore the question can be raised to what extent certain cinematic dispositifs

resonate with structures of power that saturate other spheres of social and cultural life.

How does all of this relate to embodiment? On the one hand, body enters the theory of dispositif as

one of its elements to be managed. In Foucault's theory the human body or the need to produce a

particular body (for instance, a homosexual body) can be that strategic function that a dispositif

performs (Foucault, 1978), and that specific body is embodied by specific subject (homosexual

subject). A particular way of embodying can also be the effect for a dispositif to produce. For

example, Judith Butler's notion that gender is performed can also be seen as a result of a complex

dispositif that seeks to produce an effect of specific “female embodiment” of a female-sexed

subject. And in the theory of cinematic dispositif the viewer is already addressed as an embodied

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subject, quite often appealing to that embodiment (for instance, think of early cinema's attempts to

shock the viewer through creating a visual illusion that the train is running straight into them but

also vibrating chairs in contemporary movie theatres). Thus embodiment and body can be taken as

an object of dispositif or as one of its elements, or both.

I propose to see pornography as a dispositif for several reasons. First of all, because dispositif

allows to account better both for discursive and non-discursive elements of pornography. If

dispositif is ultimately a set of relations between media technology (and related practices), specific

viewing position and the form of address that produces certain effects, it allows to account not only

for the content of pornography but also the way it addresses the viewer, the specifics of medium

involved, and practices of viewing. While Linda Williams' account of pornography as a discourse

can be equally encompassing, I believe that the concept of dispositif allows for better identification

of specific elements and helps avoid the common understanding of discourse as only related to

language. Furthermore, using the term dispositif instead of discourse helps blur the distinction

between “the viewer” as a human (read: ontologically prioritized), rational and autonomous subject,

and technology as a mere tool that this subject employs.

Secondly, dispositif is about relations, which connects it to embodiment. While “the body”, as stated

at the beginning of this chapter, is more seen as an “object”, embodiment is rather a process

inextricably connected to practice, enaction and experience. In a way, embodiment in itself is a

relation, an open-ended structure connecting matter to itself, mingling mind/body into one living

being beyond separation, and putting it in a constant circuit with other elements and environment as

a whole. Brian Massumi calls it a “technique of existence” (Massumi, 2011), Deleuze and Guattari

speak of an “assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) and Coté almost directly claims that body

itself – and I do read it as “living body” – is a dispositif by saying that “body is not only always in a

composition of relations with heterogeneous elements (which invariably includes forms of

information and communication technology) but its capacity to be affected is calibrated by those

mediated relations”(Coté, 2011: 385).

Finally, understanding pornography as dispositif opens a possibility to look closer at the very

phenomenon of pornography without immediately reverting to pro/anti debate and to recognize the

shifting political implications and resonances that pornography entails and allows for. It draws our

attention to implicit structures of pornography rather than concrete narratives of particular

pornographic films or videos (even though I do not mean to claim that focusing on specific movies

or videos is not worthwhile) and thus allows to speak about the mode of address instead of just plot

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and filming techniques. Dispositif also renders pornography's effects variable and to some extent

open-ended because these effects will depend on the specific relations of the elements of dispositif

instead on a universal understanding of what pornography is or is not.

So what are the elements of pornography as dispositif or the pornographic dispositif? First, a

particular medium through which pornographic content is delivered. It can be photography or film,

or digital video, or even digital animation video. Without going into detail of each medium, it is

important to note that pornographic dispositif, precisely because pornography is ultimately a

mediated phenomenon, entails a dispositif of that specific medium, such as cinema, or networked

digital video pornography online, and thus also specific practices of consumption related to it.

Second, a specific mode of address. Pornography's mode of address is profoundly visceral. It

appeals (or at least seeks to appeal) to the body of the viewer and not just body as object but a

sensing, living body – in other words, an embodied spectator. In a very simple way one could say

that pornography's mode of address is visceral because it seeks to arouse the viewer. This mode of

address manifests, as Linda Williams have showed, in particular filming techniques (such as cum-

shots and close-ups of genitals, for instance) and narratives that feed on and back into discourses

and desires prevalent in a particular society (such as the urge to “speak truth”, to make the body –

and especially the female body - “confess its secrets”), ascribing pornography to the list of films

that fall into the category of the “body genre” (Williams, 1991). This mode of address relies on the

affectivity of the body (its ability to affect and be affected) as a pre-individual force, as well as on

socio-culturally specific assumptions on what is sexy, desirable and “hot”.

Mode of address and “basic apparatus” of the medium thus creates the viewing situation. Viewing

situation, in my understanding, entails not just specific discursive position of the viewer but also

material practices that are part of what “watching porn” means. What exactly it means is historically

and culturally specific and dependent on the aforementioned two elements. Early stag films were

viewed privately and served as a social space for male bonding (Williams, 1989); Deep Throat

(1972) was screened in movie theatres and thus available to general audience; rental videos are for

home viewing on TVs, and online porn available via tube websites is accessible through personal

computers and smartphones that by today are quite ubiquitous in the Global North. Each of these

contexts produces a different ideal viewing situation that is dependent both on discourses on how

technologies and cultural products are supposed to be used, as well as practices of use encouraged

by and even built in the technologies themselves.

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I want to stress again that these three elements are interdependent – changes in one are likely to

incur changes in the others, and not necessarily in a linear way. Thus overall effects of the

pornographic dispositif will depend on changing relations between these elements and their socio-

cultural embeddings. Pornographic dispositif also resonates with larger formations. For instance,

while analysing perspectival painting, Brian Massumi argues that it resonated with absolutist

monarchy through the common feature of having one point of focus: point of perspective in

painting and the monarch in political structure (Massumi, 2011). Thus, for instance, Rosi Braidotti

also argues that pornography is ultimately about the commodification of representations, even a sort

of affect-mongering one might say, because it submits bodies and desires to the logics of capitalist

economy (Braidotti, 2011a).

While the latter might be true to a large extent, I believe that pornography's effects cannot be

reduced to one set of outcomes (such as feeding into the capitalist economy). A more thorough

analysis is needed of what are the specific affordances and constraints of the pornographic dispositif

and how does it reverberate other social, cultural, economic and political structures. Such analysis,

furthermore, needs to be attentive to the specifics of the practices that the pornographic dispositif

entails: both medium-related practices, as well as practices of consumption. In the case of

pornography, embodiment forms a “red thread” through all the elements of this dispositif in a sense

that it is at the heart of the media, the genre with its specific mode of address, and the viewing

position that it creates. In other words, the concept of the dispositif enables me to bring three focal

points together: the focus on practices, related discourses and the specificity of the medium, and ask

what kind of position does embodiment occupy in all these realms, as well as how it changes

throughout the operation of pornographic dispositif. In the next chapter thus I will analyse the

pornographic dispositif of a particular kind of pornography: online pornography.

Chapter 2

EMBODIMENT IN ONLINE PORNOGRAPHY: PORNOGRAPHIC

DISPOSITIF AND THE PRODUCTION OF BODY IN E-PORN

Consider opening one of the most popular free porn “tube” websites such as Youporn.com. What

you will be met with is thumbnails of videos you could chose from. As you move the pointer over

them, each thumbnails provides a short slide-show of what is happening in the video. Next to that,

some pop-up adds appear and there's an animated ad on the right hand side that captures the

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attention by showing a woman with apparently digitally enhanced breasts, moving up and down

over a man in speeded up rhythm. There are over 50 categories to choose from, or you can pick one

of the videos that appear on the front page (“Bounce that Ass”, “Skinny blonde gets huge facial”,

“Split my tight pussy with that big Cock”, “Teen girl tongue fucks a mature”, to name titles of just a

few). Browsing can take some time or no time at all – depending on how specific one's wishes are

and how well one can avoid pop-up ads.

After a while I open the video called “Secretary gives Blowjob in Elevator” in the Amateur

category. The video is only 3:55 minutes long. It is filmed by an elevator security camera. It starts

with a man and a woman, both in business suits, kissing, and continues with the woman going on to

perform fellatio. Camera zooms-in to focus on the woman (some users in the comments section

below the video speculate that the camera actually did not zoom- in but rather that the zoom was

done by the editor). The video is silent, and that strikes as odd, since usually there are at least some

sounds of heavy breathing and pounding. At the same time on the right hand corner next to the

video there is an image of a woman (she would be categorized as “mature” in conventional porn

language) inviting to visit some German website by showing her Brazilian-waxed vulva.

Next.

“Teen Raila Shows what She's Got at Girls Do Porn”, a 20-minute video that starts in a hotel room

with a young woman sitting on a large bed, answering questions to the camera about herself and her

sex life. I decide to skip to the “real deal”. I press the pointer on the timeline at the fifth minute. She

is now on the bed, being fucked quite hard from behind, with camera man giving directions (“slap

her!”, “change position a bit, you're making fanny farts”) to the male actor and the young woman

(supposedly an amateur from the street, but no one can verify that, of course) , while the camera

focuses either on the face of the female or on the genitals. There are no condoms, gloves or lube

used and it does not seem that the video was edited to cut any parts out. There are some bright lights

placed in the room and the video itself is in high definition. I go through the timeline animations

(the snapshots of the video appearing as you move the pointer through the timeline) and close the

video without waiting for a traditional “money shot”.

Next.

I visit live chat cam directory on Redtube.com. Again, they are outlined as small frames on the

page. As I move the pointer onto one of them, the image becomes bigger and live streaming starts.

If I move my pointer elsewhere, the live connection stops. I can see three people, two men and a

woman, sitting on a couch. Waiting, apparently. Some of them are yawning. I move my pointer to

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the other webcam image. A girl is inviting the participants of the chat to “tip” her if they want to see

her breasts. Depending on the amount, she might invite them for a “private chat” (“Three highest

tippers will get a private show, guys!”). In the meantime she moves closer and then away from the

webcam, giving a smile, showing of her cleavage. Yet in another webchat a woman is lying on her

bed, stroking herself, and at the same time responding to the questions texted to her in the chat

frame (“No Max, I am from Vegas. But I have family in New York”). Another girl in another cam

frame, puffing her lips – in popular culture this is called “a duckface”. Somehow it makes me laugh

uncontrollably.

Next.

***

In this chapter I will analyse online pornography as a dispositif constituted by basic apparatus, mode

of address and viewing situation. Before starting the analysis I would like to clarify my choice of

concepts. Online sex (or cyber-sex to use the older term) usually refers to live sexual interaction

online via webcams or sexually explicit real-time chat messages that might include both text and

images. Online pornography, on the other hand, refers more to pornographic videos disseminated

online through the websites and include much less “live” interaction (though there are “live”

webcam websites, but then usually only one person is visible as they perform in front of the cam).

The growing trend in the latter in the past years has been amateur pornography: videos produced by

so called non-professionals, usually blurring the lines between performance, production and

consumption. These videos end up on video sharing websites such as RedTube.com, YouPorn.com

and the like.

In the framework of this analysis, however, I will regard both “live” sexual interactions and

consumption of internet pornography as “online sex”. The reasons underlying this decision are

three-fold. On the one hand, taking both cyber-sex and internet porn as one is related to my

approach to pornography as embodied material-semiotic practice rather than only sexual

representations. Secondly, with the growth of amateur porn and also increasing availability and

accessibility of online pornography makes cyber-sex and consumption of online porn more easily

interchangeable. With a click of a mouse one can go from viewing porn videos to filming oneself, to

sharing this video online again, to engaging with another person through the webcam in real time.

Thirdly, the “tube” websites that are the focus of my analysis often include both porn videos and

live webcam chats.

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For these reasons I will use the concept of e-porn as the key notion that refers to these pornographic

spaces of tube websites, and will use the term “online sex” when referring to more general

phenomenon that encompasses the practices of e-porn. I will argue that in these practices the body

is closely engaged with technology. This tightly knit intra-active relation between body and

technology shows that the medium plays a significant part in shaping the embodied experience of

sexuality. I will regard this engagement as material-discursive and will therefore pay attention to

both elements.

E-porn and online sex should be seen as a part of contemporary technoculture in general. This

technoculture is characterized not only by the domination of sight over other senses (MacLuhan,

1964) but also by a peculiar “fear of the body” (Gillis, 2004: 93). The expressions of this fear can

be traced in a wide range of ideas, from early cybernerds' dreams to leave “the meat” behind and set

the mind free to explore cyberspace, to general claims that cyberpsace helps to prevent unnecessary

or undesirable face-to-face interactions. E-porn enters this context as a sort of “clean sex”: it

involves no exchange of bodily fluids, no need to touch or smell the other body, social interactions

are limited and more easily controllable (all you have to do is to go off-line, should you stop

enjoying), and your own body is supposedly more passive than it would be during the “real”

intercourse. In other words, it's just you getting off on “dirty” images sterilized by the machine that

delivers them.

Thus e-porn is paradoxically caught between aiming at dis-embodiment and strongly focusing on

the body. However, the practices of using online pornography and cybersex are inextricable from

physicality of movement and touch, as I will show throughout the course of this chapter. In addition

to that, the discourses of pollution, contagion and addiction characterize contemporary debates on

pornography, making it into a phenomenon that somehow poisons and perverts “natural” sexuality

(Smith & Atwood, 2013). Thus e-porn is both “clean” and “dirty”, “out there” and “little shameful

secret” at the same time.

The dialectics of exposure and covertness, excess and control is nothing new – Michel Foucault

discussed it in detail in his three volumes on the history of sexuality (Foucault 1978, 1985 and

1986). However, what I seek to do in this section is to look at online pornography through the

theoretical framework of dispositif as a material-discursive phenomenon and ask how this dispositif

engages and produces mediated embodiment of a desiring, sexual consumer. I will begin my

analysis with looking in detail at the three elements that make a dispositif of online porn, and then

will show how this dispositif relies on and re-produces an embodiment that is inextricable from

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technology, a body whose sexuality is enacted through and with technology: a body in e-porn.

2.1. The Dispositif of Online Porn

The Basic Apparatus

Let me start with the basic apparatus: the technological facilities that bring online pornography to

its consumer. Preliminary findings of porn research, conducted by Clarissa Smith, Feona Attwood

and Martin Barker in 2010 indicate that the most popular sources of pornography are “tube” sites

and downloads12, both of which first and foremost require a personal computer, with a working

Operating System and (assuming that the majority of personal computer owners do run their

computers with commercial software such as Windows or MAC) a graphic user interface. Secondly,

this computer has to be part of the network infrastructure, i.e. connected to Internet either through

wireless network or cable, and this network can be accessed through appropriate Internet browser

software. These two elements – personal computer and network connection – are by now part and

parcel of everyday work and leisure activities, at least in the Global North (Schäfer, 2011).

The everydayness of personal computer (which denotes both a discourse of familiarity as well as

the actual ease of usage) plays an important role here. In her book Queer Phenomenology (2006)

Sarah Ahmed claims that the un/familiarity of things and spaces either afford or hinder one's

activities through allowing (or not) to unproblematically extend oneself into and through them.

Specific spaces also allow easier the extension of certain bodies and not others. As for personal

computer and Internet, any computer-literate person is able to use the technology relatively without

major obstacles, and improvements are constantly developed to accommodate the needs of people

with disabilities. This makes the Internet a familiar place of everyday interactions and activities.

On the other hand, Internet is also posited as a particular kind of space. Popular discourse on

Internet from its very inception played around the imaginary of cyberspace to which the mind can

escape from the burdens of the fleshy everyday here-and-now. On the other hand, already as early

as 1995, Sherry Turkle has aptly pointed out that cyberspace (or virtual reality – VR – to use a more

12 Preliminary findings are available at the pornresearch.org website: http://www.pornresearch.org/results.html

(accessed on 23 June 2013).

36

contemporary term) is not disconnected from “real life” (RL): identities online often (at least

partially) correspond to those of RL. The rise of web 2.0 culture of user-participation,

prosumersim13 and social media further blurred the VR/RL divide (Schäfer, 2011).

However, while the widespread ownership of personal computers and computer literacy as well as

their use for leisure makes this medium a familiar part of the everyday private spaces and activities,

the network as a technology and its dynamics in fact problematises the relation of familiarity by de-

stabilising the linearity of information flows and blurring the public/private divide. An interesting

approach to the network as a space and analysis of it is proposed by Tiziana Terranova (2004). She

suggests that digital network is an informational space, which is characterised not so much by

computer mediation but rather by certain structural qualities. I quote her at length:

[informational space] presents an excess of sensory data, a radical indeterminacy in our

knowledge, and a non-linear temporality involving a multiplicity of mutating variables and

different intersecting levels of observation and interaction. … An informational space is

inherently immersive, excessive and dynamic: one cannot simply observe it, but becomes

almost unwittingly overpowered by it. It is not so much a three-dimensional, perspectival

space where subjects carry out actions and relate to each other, but a field of displacements,

mutations and movements that do not support the actions of a subject, but decompose it,

recompose it and carry it along. (Terranova, 2004: 37, emphases mine).

It is also not exclusively homo- or heterogeneous space. Internet is a network of networks –

internetwork (Terranova, 2004) – whose architecture is primarily open: it is designed in such a way

as to accommodate new additions, as long as they use several key protocols. Internet thus tends

towards “modulating the relationship between differentiation and universality” (Terranova, 2004:

56) by, on the one hand, solving the problem of incompatibility through either subsuming

differences vertically or horizontally, and, on the other hand, leaving opportunities open for new

elements to be added. Internet as the primary application of network technology allows

heterogeneous elements to be added to it without the necessity of one specific centre of control.

Moreover, not only computers but also many other technical devices, from phones to refrigerators,

can be connected to Internet, as long as they use the right “language” of communication.

Because of its ability to modulate the relations between the particular and the universal, network

13 A culture and technologies that allow the consumers of the content to be also producers (Lister, Dovey et.al., 2009:

34)

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technology resonates with wider cultural debates on and processes of globalization and capitalism

(Terranova, 2004). Internet is paradoxical in a way that it creates an experience of a distinct space

akin to homogeneity, and yet at the same time can be characterized by multiplicity of channels,

variety of content available and the possibility of the unexpected (you never know what you may

find wondering around online). Thus, just like globalization is better described by the term

“glocalization” (Robertson, 1995), so are the information processes on Internet better described by

the dynamics of centripetal force when it comes to explaining the relation between hetero- and

homogeneity. As Terranova writes when she talks about the particularities of network space:

“[r]emoved from the central controlling gaze of a single centre, space tends not so much to

fragment into individual cells, as to diverge, hybridizing itself around peculiar features of different

milieus and cultures” (Terranova, 2004: 57).

I consider pornographic tube websites one of those clusters of informational space. First of all, the

websites are structured in a way as to confront the viewer with excess and abundance,

fragmentation and coherence. Porn “tube websites”, such as the aforementioned Porntube.com or

Redtube.com, seem to have a pretty generic structure (see figure 1a and 1b). Each website contains

thousands of videos14, usually outlined in rows of frames, each offering a slideshow preview of the

content. Next to that animated advertisements are placed on the sides, with occasional pop-up ads

appearing as the user moves through the website. This immediate glance at the outline already

points not only to the excess but also to the fragmentation as well as coherence of the e-porn space:

there are multiple fragments (videos and ads; textual and graphic elements; promotional videos

linking to other websites – a sort of covert advertisements, excerpts from existing full-feature porn

movies and videos uploaded by consumers – “original” content) that are held together by the frame

of the website and common theme (excessive sexual explicitness).

Multiplicity and abundance of tube-porn informational space is managed through categorisation,

which could be seen as creating sub-clusters within a single website. Next to the thematic

categories15, one can choose based on the country of origin (either of the video, or of performers),

type of video (“live” streaming or pre-recorded), date, popularity, “viewed right now”, quality (HD

videos) – see figures 2 and 3. Some websites, such as Redtube.com, provide an option to search

14 To give an impression of the amount of videos available, on 24 June 2013 I estimated that free porn website

Redtube.com contained roughly 37.750 porn videos, most viewed of which had over 18 million views; Youporn.com, according to my estimation, had over 63.000 videos (6.352 pages with 10 videos per page on average). xHamster.com contained over 10.000 pages of videos, with 10 to 30 videos per page.

15 Again, to give an example, Youporn.com has 64 thematic categories, Redtube.com – 32, xHamster.com – 90 thematic categories divided in “Straight”, “Transsexual” and “Gay” sections.

38

according to the most popular search-terms16. Of course, these sub-clusters are by no means static:

Figure 1a: Layout of porn tube website Youporn.com

Figure 1b: The layout of porn tube website Redtube.com

16 On 24 June 2013 the list contained 500 search-terms, from “latina” to “rimjob”.

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Figure 2: Categories of videos on Youporn.com

categories change, converge (one video can be ascribed to multiple categories) and overspill (same

category can contain both “professional” and “amateur” porn, which also are available as separate

categories and characterize more the type or a particular “feel” of porn rather than content). Thus

categorisation serves both as an excess management strategy, but also as a mechanism of further

multiplication of this excess.

Multiplicity of fragments and phenomenon of categorization renders e-porn space not only

excessive and indeterminate, but also non-linear. Non-linearity, according to Terranova, relates

directly to movement, which is here to be understood both as movement through space (crossing

different spheres or moving from A to B), and as duration (movement in time that also always

leaves a trace, changes the space that is crossed through). This non-linearity manifests both in the

movement of information, and of the movement of the consumer in informational space. First of all,

at the very basic level of any digital network technology, the paths of information do not always

make a straight line: packages of information are let loose to find the most convenient path between

sender and receiver17.

17 When the name of the website one is trying to reach is typed into the web browser, a command is sent to the Internet Service Provider, and from there travels on till it reaches the Domain Name Server, which then directs it to the web server that stores information of the intended website. Web server responds by breaking down the information file (say, a particular article or a video, and the whole lot of other elements that constitute the appearance of the website) into smaller packets of information. These pieces are let free to find their own most convenient routes back to the computer that made the request, where they are assembled again into a coherent message: the website appears in one's browser

40

Figure 3: Video frame on Redtube.com. Note the possibility to rank the video (right-hand side) and

sort videos according to when they were uploaded, how highly they are rated, etc. (the bar above

the video frame).

The consumer in online space, and especially in e-porn space, moves likewise in a non-linear, to

some extent indeterminate way: consumers move through the space of e-porn, as Keilty has shown

(2012), not through the search but through the act of browsing. Browsing, as opposed to search that

is more target-oriented, entails spending time stumbling through the space, allowing random objects

to catch your attention and lead you to unexpected places. On the other hand, browsing is not

necessarily a dis-interested kind of wandering around: it is a sensation of being in-duration which

goes hand in hand with repetition and craving. As Keilty puts it, “we constantly shift to new images,

creating a process of browsing in which pleasure derives from the habitual and repetitious delay and

deferral of satisfaction” (Keilty, 2012: 5).

Consumer's movement in e-porn space also cuts across the spacial and discursive division of

public/private and real/virtual. Porn tube websites today usually are designed in such a way as to

include at least some of the web 2.0. elements, namely, elements that encourage some degree of

interaction or user-feedback (see figure 4 and 5). Therefore there is often a comments section under

each video, “like” and “dislike” buttons, possibility to register and have your own profile on the

website where you can compile lists of favourite videos, upload videos yourself and interact with

window. This shows that even at the very basic level of network architecture there is a possibility of flow and connectivity between basically any two (or more) points in the network.

41

other viewers (in some cases these profiles look not unlike Facebook personal pages). In some

websites, such as Youporn.com, viewers are also allowed to categorize, tag videos, and label them

as belonging to a particular group or style: movement e-porn space thus always leaves a trace, even

if that trace is just the change in a number of views for a particular video.

Next to the aspects related to movement, touch is also an important element in the basic apparatus

of e-porn. First of all, there is the very material fact of the actual touch of mouse and the keyboard.

At this level touch correlates with movement: the pointer moves on the screen, text appears in the

browser window, video is launched, paused or stopped at the touch of a button. However, the sense

of touch also comes in through the immersive quality of e-porn as an informational space. As

mentioned earlier, informational space overflows the consumer through excess and abundance, it

carries them away yet at the same time allows for temporary stops, thus alternating between the

intensity of a brief stroke and engulfing entirety.

Figure 4: The comments section at Redtube.com, live streaming.

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Figure 5: Example of a personal user profile on Tube8.com

Mode of Address

The way informational space of e-porn is structured at the level of basic apparatus in its turn

impacts the mode of pornographic address and invests e-porn with qualities different from its non-

networked forms. First of all, most of the online porn videos in tube-websites are relatively short,

with an average length of 15 minutes18. This speeds up the regular sequence of “sexual numbers”

(Williams, 1989: 72) or forces porn directors to either cut some of them out, or focus on a particular

number. Furthermore, with more videos being produced by amateurs, sometimes the whole video

focuses just on one position or one particular moment of the whole sex act. This has as much to do

with the positioning of the camera (whether it is stationary or hand-held, and whether there is a

camera person behind it), as with the editing work (or lack of thereof). In any case, this makes e-

porn both more dense (in terms of availability), and more fractured and dispersed (in terms of

content) at the same time.

The density/dispersion dynamics are also re-instantiated through the compression/diffraction of

pornographic space content-wise. If pornographic DVDs (not to mention full-featured movies) are

18 Source: http://www.salon.com/2013/05/30/is_success_killing_the_porn_industry_partner/ (accessed on 25 June

2013). Longer videos, sometimes even up to one hour, are also available occasionally, but they do not seem to be in the majority.

43

typically dedicated to one particular genre or fetish (except for compilations, though even those

usually come under a specific thematic heading, such as “amateur compilations”), tube-websites

contain numerous genres and themes, separated into categories, yet still just a mouse click away.

The possibility in many tube-websites to switch between pre-recorded videos and live streaming

further increases the abundance of choice and variety. Thus e-porn is a space where the variety of

genres and themes exist next to each other and are easily available for the consumer, exemplifying

the movement of centripetal force that operates throughout the networked space of Internet in

general.

The possibility for the consumer to switch from one video to the next without almost any effort, as

well as the phenomenon of browsing that is part-and-parcel of the movement in e-porn space,

creates the circumstances where different videos are in constant competition for the viewer's

attention. As the user engages in the practice of browsing, half-curious, half-disinterested, for porn

producers it starts coming down to catching the attention. Thus if porn has always been famous for

its excessive language and anatomical detail to create a visceral appeal through exposure, the

abundance of porn online pushes the excess and exposure, eliminating or reducing to the basics all

the other techniques that do not concern the body directly (such as narrative, for instance).

Some have argued that this exponential growth of porn online and its increasing availability have

made porn more extreme than ever (Dines, 2010). To some extent, I would agree with that: e-porn

space is populated not only with tube-websites that are able to cater for a large variety of tastes, but

also with productions that are as specific as they are controversial, especially from a feminist

perspective (think, for instance, of 1rapetube.com or forcetube.com: videos available on these

platforms can easily raise the question whether the scenes are performed, or are they real footage of

an actual sexual assault and abuse). Since the major tube-websites are often linked together19, this

makes these controversial niches easily available not only to those with specific interests, but to

every one who is looking for porn online: sexual niches of all sorts are both more visible, and much

more part of the mainstream consciousness (Paasonen, 2012: 37-9).

Thus if full-featured porn was aiming rather at seducing the viewer through allowing them to slide

into the narrative space, go through the sexual numbers and come out satisfied – a rather smooth

movement of “sliding in” to the pornographic space, e-porn attempts to catch and hold the attention

19 For instance, Pornhub.com also serves as a gateway to the website ExtremeTube.com, among others, and sexual-

abuse connoting videos can be easily found on xHamster.com by searching “rape”, while the search for “extreme” gives a list of videos that mostly picture insertion of large objects into vaginas and anuses.

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by what Susanna Paasonen calls “the grab” (Paasonen, 2012). This grab, according to her, is

affective, operating through the material-discursive quality of porn: porn appeals to the viewer's

viscerality, to their bodily knowledge, but also to the discursive tropes and imagery related to them,

notions of cultural value, taste, social hierarchies (ibid.: 256-8).

The most direct and easily noticeable technique that pornography employs in order to grab the

viewer is exposure. This is not new: already early porn scholars highlighted that pornography aims

at revealing and exposing that which is not normally visible through the technique of cinematic

close-up and a certain scrutinizing, almost medical, gaze that it creates (Williams, drawing on

Foucault, calls this phenomenon scientia sexualis). This scrutiny comes from the will to know, from

the imperative for the body to confess its secrets. At the same time, as Paasonen points out, porn

also works through tapping into the bodily knowledge of the viewer, a certain intercorporiety, which

is especially the case with the appeal of amateur porn: it is supposedly easier for the viewers to

relate to, to “feel like” the bodies on screen when they resemble bodies of “real people” as opposed

to the polished bodies of porn stars.

However, I argue that “just knowing” is not enough in the age of e-porn: it is not anymore only

about revealing how sex “actually” happens, but about expanding the boundaries of and

experimenting with how sex could possibly happen. The videos of “deep-throating” and gagging20,

double anal penetration, complicated sex positions, “ass-to-mouth” and other similar sexual

numbers21, “facial”22, bukkake23, gokkun24, “snowballing”25, smothering and “face-sitting”, and so

on, are if not part-and-parcel of mainstream e-porn, then at least not only delineated to fetish

sections or to performance by professionals only. It does not mean that these sexual practices are in

itself necessarily “extreme”, but rather that they do defy the stereotype of “normal” sex, i.e. smooth-

penetrative-heterosexual-reproductive intercourse. 20 “Deep-throating” refers to deep fellatio technique, when the whole of the penis is in the mouth, literally going into the

throat. Gage reflex is often a result of this, and it might come with the shortness of breath.“Gagging” thus refers to forced deep-throating, often when the one performing the fellatio is not in control of how deep or how fast the penis moves into the throat. Other synonyms for gagging are “throat fucking” and “face fucking”. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-throating (accessed 23 June 2013)

21 Ass-to-mouth involves anal sex followed immediately by oral sex. It is one of the generic sexual numbers in porn, next to others such as “ass-to-pussy” and “ass-to-other-mouth”. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ass_to_mouth (accessed 23 June 2013)

22 Ejaculation on the face. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_%28sex_act%29 (accessed 23 June 2013).

23 Bukkake is a pornographic genre where multiple men ejaculate on the body (usually the face) of a woman or another man. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukkake (accessed 23 June 2013).

24 A sexual act of (usually) a woman drinking semen of (usually) multiple men, often from a glass or other sort of container. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gokkun (accessed 23 June 2013).

25 Transferring semen from one person's mouth to the other's, usually by kissing. Often involves multiple partners, thus making the amount of transferred liquid to grow larger (to “snowball”) because of the mixture with saliva. Source: Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowballing_%28sexual_practice%29 (accessed 23 June 2013).

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Furthermore, I argue that parallels can be found between a sort of “jackass culture”26 of

experimentation with taboos, cultural as well as bodily boundaries; “fail culture”27 exemplified by

the immense popularity of websites such as Failblog.org and related websites dedicated to the

humorous “fails” on Facebook, at the workplace, during parties, dates, text-messaging “fails”, etc.,

and free porn websites such as Daftporn.com, Heavy-r.com or E-fukt.com. While the latter also

contain videos of sexual acts that cause pain, involve faeces, dirt, incest, animals, depict drunk sex

and drunk “gang bangs” etc. to induce the shock reaction, quite a few videos are dedicated precisely

to “fails” that are meant to make the viewer laugh (“Hilarious cum fails”, “Funny girl causes

premature cumshot”, “French teen, anal fail”, “Accidental squirt in own face”, to mention just a few

titles). More mainstream porn tube-websites, such as Redtube.com, also have a special category

“Wild and Crazy” that features sex with people dressed as cartoon or fantasy film characters, sex

with various unconventional objects, acrobatic sex, public sex, and so on.

The “fail” and the “fucked-up” are both phenomena of web 2.0 media culture, thriving on user

participation in the production of content. Mixing humour, shock, disgust, intimidation and the

carnivalesque, “fail” and “fucked-up” are produced by the users themselves, drawing from the

situations of everyday life: the freak-show is not limited to the circus arena, but spills over to the

mundane. In e-porn this means stretching the boundaries of what a body can do, ridiculing the

seriousness of porn performance, rupturing the “digital smooth body” (Bernardi, 2007) and pointing

out its failures, exposing the grotesque of the body and defying the imperative of the “normal”.

Finally, this convergence of cultures, and the presumed threat that it poses to the “normal” and

“decent”, is at the root of popular discourses around porn. These discourses position porn as both

ubiquitous and effaced (the “dirty little secret”), making an artificial split between the “normal”

users of internet and porn-watchers (Paasonen, 2012: 32). Smith and Atwood argue that the

resurgence of contemporary anti-porn is based precisely on the idea of porn as pollution and

contamination of otherwise “healthy” sexuality (Smith & Atwood, 2013). The public outcries on the

supposed addiction to porn, the urge to “protect the [women and] children”, posit e-porn as filth and

threat and express great anxieties both about the perversion of the non-mediated life, as well as the

contamination of the organic, natural, integral and intact body by the inorganic, non-natural, de-

26 “Jackass” is an American reality series, originally shown on MTV from 2000 to 2002, featuring people performing

various dangerous, crude self-injuring stunts and pranks. Source: Wikipedia,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackass_(TV_series) (accessed 25 June 2013). 27 More on the phenomenon of “fail” can be found here: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fail (accessed 25 June

2013).

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composable, fractured technology of the network.

To sum up, the e-porn mode of address is the one of a material-discursive, affective grab, made

possible by the investment of labour of the viewer, fluidity of informational space and convergence

of popular and porn culture. Where does this leave the consumer of e-porn?

Viewing Situation

The specifics of the basic apparatus and mode of address of e-porn construct a particular viewing

situation. It must be noted that this viewing situation is an ideal one: the way each particular person

consumes porn online is specific, however, I argue that the specifics of e-porn outlined previously

in this chapter afford certain general positioning of the consumer, a positioning that is a result of

material practices as much as discourses around e-porn. Thus what follows is the analysis of the

viewing situation as constructed by e-porn structure, and the examples will be used to illustrate

rather than accurately represent the way porn is consumed online.

One of the commentator online has described porn in the following way:

Porn (noun) - Any video or image you lose interest in immediately after orgasm. Usage:

"Porn *click* fap fap fap"28

Even though described from a male perspective29 and implying a certain judgement of the

quality/attractiveness of porn, I see this commentary as a quite emblematic depiction of the ideal

viewing situation of e-porn. This situation involves two basic elements: movement and touch, both

virtual (the clicking-through in the virtual space to reach the video or image that enables the

statement: “porn”) and actual (the act of masturbation, the implied arousal that leads to orgasm, the

physical movement of clicking and setting the video/image in motion). It also exemplifies the

inextricability of movement and touch: one moves in the space of e-porn through touching and is

touched by the movement going on around.

The kind of consumer's moving-touching that is going on in this space is not entirely smooth but

28 Commentator forgotmymath, full comments thread available here: http://imgur.com/gallery/oqcBL (accessed 25 June

2013). 29 The “fap” is meant to express the sound of male masturbation, thus giving birth to the word “fapping” which is used

as a slang for masturbation. See “fapping” in Urban Dictionary: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fapping (accessed 25 June 2013).

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entails different intensities. The relatively low-intensity moments of browsing are ruptured by

affective responses of pleasure, disgust, revulsion, amusement, etc., that correspond to physical

movement of the consumer's body: self-touch, closing and opening new videos, freezing in

anticipation, stillness in waiting, etc. The overall feeling of the flow which comes from immersion

in any informational space, as Terranova has shown (2004), leaves the consumer in a state of

double-consciousness of being here and being in a place of fantasy (Callois, 2001), or perhaps

rather – a state of inhabiting a “mixed reality” that knits together virtual and actual and allows these

different intensities to cross through.

These different intensities characterise not only the affective reactions to e-porn, but also the kinds

of spaces the viewer crosses. As mentioned before, e-porn mixes private and public both through

the actual practices of consumption encouraged by the basic apparatus (the personal computer or

laptop or even a smartphone with appropriate software connotes solitary use, while the network can

be seen as a relatively public space; inclusion of the elements of social media in e-porn brings the

public, the social element out in a quite explicit way), as well as by discourses around these

practices (the discourse of porn as a shameful little secret further encourages covert, solitary

consumption). Thus the consumer itself is placed in a spot of both concealment and exposure, and

not least because their movement online always leaves a trace: a trace of views-per-video, browsing

history, comments and other interactions, for instance. In addition to that, it is not only the

consumer that leaves traces in online space – e-porn leaves traces in the “bodily archive”

(Sedgwick, 2003), be it the intensity of the sexual pleasure or other affective states.

Furthermore, the fact that consumer always leaves a trace in the space through which they pass

exemplifies the prosumerist aspect of the viewing situation. The user both consumes videos and

produces internet traffic, hits, categories. Next to that, with the increasing availability of video

cameras and the ready-made genre of amateur porn, one can turn from a viewer into a porn director

in a matter of minutes. The growth and popularity of amateur porn even, I would claim, establishes

an imperative to perform, record and expose one's own sexual practices to a broader audiences.

Thus it is not just a viewer being passively touched and moved by the pornographic video – the

direction can be reversed or even made into a circle, if we consider live porn cams or live sex on

platforms such as Chatroulette.com.

Finally, the discourses around e-porn position the viewer in a place of intense discursive overload:

they are the sinners and the pleasure seekers, sex-addicts and frigid subjects, freaks and fetishists,

victims of porn industry but also the empowered ones, free to enact their desires as they please.

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Being at the intersection of different value-loaded discourses produces multiple effects for each

particular viewer, but in terms of ideal viewing situation being at the intersection of multiple

discourses makes this situation a radically unstable one, increasing the indeterminacy that is already

present in the basic apparatus and mode of address. It is not so much a situation of dialectical play

between the forbidden/shameful/dangerous and desirable/pleasant/comforting (though, without

doubt, this dynamic is also there), but rather an intra-active field of cross-overs between discourses,

intensities and practices.

Perhaps the most suitable way to capture the kind of touching-moving that characterises the viewing

situation in e-porn is through terminology of rhythm. In his essay On the Temporal Quality of the

Normalistic Fun and Thrill Tape (2004) philosopher Jürgen Link outlines the structure of the

cultural “rhythm” of contemporary Western cultures. Link defines rhythm as the “subjective and

culturally constituted immanent organization, classification, and articulation of a lived temporal

continuum” (2004: 73). He uses an example of driving: the rhythm of driving is comprised of stand-

still of the traffic-jam, the normal phase of driving and the speeding up. Speeding up provides the

thrill, which, however, is also linked to the fear of denormalization (a car crash), while traffic-jams

provide negative frustration. Link sees a similarity of structure between driving and contemporary

pop music as well as overall visual media and the cultural rhythm. He calls this rhythm basso

continuo sincopato – a dynamic march rhythm, syncopated yet continuous: it has its “ups” and

“downs”, its disruptions, and yet it never ceases.

The continuous/disrupted rhythm of basso continuo sincopato, the intensity of resonances, the

moving-touching of the consumer in the e-porn space constitutes a viewing situation that is a

position of being in affective, informational loops. Traces left in the bodily archive of the viewer

and in the online space of e-porn points to the phenomenological reversibility of the flesh: touching

implies being touched, moving means also being moved. Because of the rhythmic ruptured

continuity, the viewing situation position one occupies is constantly de/recomposed: one is a porn

viewer, but also an affective labourer, a drop in the online traffic, a hit of popularity at the video, a

line of digital text, a pair of eyes and hands that need to be grabbed.

To summarize: the viewing situation is inextricable from the basic apparatus and mode of address.

They put the viewer in a position of fragmented yet continuous, indeterminate and excessive space,

through which he/she moves rhythmically, and making him/herself susceptible to be crossed by

intensities and affected by different discourses. I will argue further that this complex dispositif of e-

porn produces a particular body – a body in e-porn – that is both a theoretical figuration and a

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material position of an embodied consumer of pornography online.

2.2. Body in e-Porn: enacting the desires of mediated flesh

Let me briefly recount Mark Hansen's concept of the body in code. It is a kind of body whose

embodiment is enacted in conjunction with technology, thus also expanding the potential of human

embodiment. As Hansen explains, it is a body who enacts the digital code and “whose (still

primary) constructive or creative power is expanded through new interactional possibilities offered

by the coded programs of 'artificial reality'” (Hansen, 2006: 38). This is made possible by the body

schema that allows for incorporation of non-human objects into ones' lived embodiment. At the core

of the body schema lies the sensibilities of movement and touch, and technologies appeal to this

motile-tactile language of the body, de- and re-teritorializing them through human-technology

interaction. Thus even if digital technologies present themselves to the user through the visual, the

appeal to the motile-tactile body schema is still there, since vision, according to Hansen, is nothing

else but the expansion of tactility beyond the boundaries of the skin (2006: 79).

Tactility is also important because it is precisely what opens up the body to technical de/re-

territorializations. Touching means always also being touched, which gives rise to the worldskin or,

as Merleau-Ponty calls it, “the flesh” (Hansen, 2006: 82). In other words, the relation of the world is

already included in the relation to oneself through the notion of “flesh”. From this comes the

concept of intercorporiety: a generality of sensibility instead of the mediation of the image of the

other. This sort of intercorporiety introduces reversibility at the core: not only I share my body

schema with the other but also this schema is made of others' corporeality (ibid.: 83), to which I

open through enaction and interaction.

If a body in code is a body whose potential and embodiment is enacted with technics, the body in e-

porn is one whose sexuality is enacted with technics and whose sexual embodiment is de/re-

territorialized through online pornography. This body emerges through the multi-layered movement

and touch that characterise the dispositif of online pornography, and it constitutes a kind of

embodiment that is based on intra-action between wires and flesh, organic matter and inorganic

machinery, discourses and affects. Body in e-porn takes shape in the practice of the consumption of

online pornography, a practice during which the body of the viewer, network technology and

pornographic imagery work together, engage one another to produce “carnal resonances”

(Paasonen, 2012). As Paasonen explains, “ [t]o resonate with one another, objects and people do not

50

need to be similar, but they need to relate and connect to one another. Resonance encompasses the

emotional and cognitive as well as the sensory and affective, and it points to the considerable effort

involved in separating the two” (Paasonen, 2012: 16).

Co-movement of the body-image-technology that produces body in e-porn also renders it de/re-

territorializable in this “intra-action” (Barad, 2007). It is de-territorialized through non-linear

movement through a space that is indeterminate and excessive; through experience of different

intensities that deny the normative idea of sex and arousal as always related to pleasure (think of

aforementioned experiences of shame, disgust, disorientation); it is functionally dis-assembled

through occupying the position of the viewer, consumer and producer simultaneously; it is de-

territorialized by seeking for sexual pleasure out of “normal” reproductive framework and through

the contact with bodies on screen that are themselves fractured into body parts rather than

positioned as integral bodies. The body in e-porn is re-territorialized and re-assembled again

through the touch at the moment of masturbation that leads to sexual gratification: e-porn serves a

function and re-establishes the correlation between sexual pleasure and body parts that are “meant”

for sex – in other words, it puts the organs back into their rightful place for the rightful function

(even if this function is not connected to reproduction anymore).

Thus the body in e-porn is rendered malleable: it is fragmented with the help of the digital and the

network, yet always present via the carnal appeal of e-porn's mode of address and the materiality of

the viewer's body. It is also susceptible to wider cultural discourses. In fact, these discourse get

inscribed in the very digital-material flesh: the sexual body of the consumer of e-porn is effaced

through the shame and secrecy, and rendered excessive at the same time. Furthermore, the body gets

connected to the media culture phenomena of “fail” and “fucked-up” both as a source of these

phenomena, and as a consumer of them. Intra-action with technology and wider media culture

constitutes the body also as a “failing body”, the “fucked-up” body, the experimental and

experimenting body whose boundaries can always be stretched and played with.

Finally, because the operating framework of the body in e-porn is intra-action rather than linear

reaction or inter-action between already clearly demarcated units, the informational space of e-porn

gets affected by the carnal presence of the sexual. Body in e-porn “meats” the internet30, pollutes it

with the messy and sticky substance of the flesh. Thus also the body on screen is not only and not

30 I am borrowing this phrasing here from Maria Llopis' performance “Meat/ing the Internet”, performed at Berlin

Porn Film Festival in 2011. For more information see: http://www.mariallopis.com/en/portfolio/meating-in-the-internet/ (accessed 12 June 2013).

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always the “digital smooth” (Bernardi, 2007), i.e. unproblematic, “clean”, easily consumed. The

digital body on screen is also that of an amateur: raw, misperformed, difficult to categorise. The

Internet is not a place to escape from the “meat” - it is a place to experience the excess, complexity

and multi-layeredness of it. It is a channel to express and enact one's sexuality, and also a place to

challenge and enhance their desire31.

The concept of the body in e-porn encourages to take seriously the question: what does it mean to

have sex via and with the machine in a networked informational space? What does it say about

embodiment in media and in contemporary culture? And most importantly: can we still speak about

the body as we know it, i.e. human body that is co-evolving with technology, yet somehow retains

its clear boundaries? The latter is precisely the critique that is often voiced with regard to

phenomenology in general and Mark Hansen's concept of the body in code in particular. According

to Patricia T. Clough (2010) Hansen's analysis stays within the boundaries of the body-proper as

well as sticks to the humanist idea of the human body as integral and wholesome (even if

malleable).Thus in the next section I will look at the emerging posthumanist thought and will ask

what kind of new perspectives does it bring to thinking about bodies in technologies and what

happens when these perspectives serve as lenses to look at online pornography.

Chapter 3

MATTER RE-CONFIGURED: FROM BODY IN E-PORN TO THE POLITICS

OF TECHNO-EMBODIMENT

In this chapter I would like to come back to the question of human embodiment and the dynamics of

power that this embodiment is entangled in. I will suggest that the body in e-porn allows to re-

define human body as a technobody: an embodiment that mixes organic and inorganic and

effectively (even if discursively the purity of dualisms is often maintained) blurs the lines between

the human and the machine. Technobodies not only are susceptible to different modes of power, but

also point to different sources of potential, alternative strategies for sexual politics. To arrive at

these points, however, the phenomenological line of thought that I have been following so far needs

to be “updated” or perhaps rather “looked at” through the posthumanist theories of body and

embodiment.

31 Preliminary findings of the Online Porn Research, conducted by Atwood, Smith and Barker (2012), indicate that

consumers go online for porn not only when they “are horny” but also when they “want to feel horny”.

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Posthumanism is a relatively recent strand of critical thought and philosophy. It refers first and

foremost to the critique of Western humanism that is marked by anthropocentrism, clear-cut

Cartesian dualisms (mind/body, human/animal etc.), identification of subjectivity with rationality

and free will (Braidotti, 2006). It also questions the very status of the human as a clearly defined

entity, separated from other forms of organic and inorganic life, aiming at re-defining what counts

as a human and what counts as a subject in general. The figure of post-human then is a post-

anthropocentric subject whose being is not a fixed ontological category, but rather a process of

becoming, an actualization of multiple intersecting forces constituting a fluid and non-unitary

subjectivity.

However, posthumanism can also refer to the current condition or predicament that humanity finds

itself in the midst of. This condition is a result not only of a mounting body of critique of

humanism, that gained its momentum with post-structuralism (Braidotti, 2010), but also of

technological developments that challenged the integrity of the human and his placement at the

privileged ontological position (Braidotti, 2013, Wolfe, 2010). Most notable among these

developments are those of biotechnologies and information-communication technologies,

establishing science and technology studies as one of the main fields in which contemporary

posthumanist thought takes shape.

As Rosi Braidotti argues, science and technology studies give birth mostly to the brand of analytic

posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013), as well as to cultural-theoretical movements such as

“transhumanism”32 and “singularity movement”33. Posthumanism coming from the field of moral

philosophy, however, establishes itself as reactive to the posthuman predicament (Braidotti, ibid.),

often with a great dose of scepticism towards new technologies and their impact on the human. Last

but not least, she argues, there is posthuman thought that builds for the biggest part on continental

philosophy, anti-humanist philosophies of subjectivity and aims at developing a brand of “critical

post-humanism” (ibid.: 38) that would remain sensitive to the modes of power and lines of

difference that posthuman predicament affects.

32 Transhumanist's movement envisions a future in which development of technologies will have impacted the current

human condition and humans' psychological, intellectual and physical abilities to such an extent that it would give birth to posthumanity. For a detailed description of the movement see Bostrom, 2005.

33 “Singularity movement” or “singularitarianism” is a movement and thought whose followers hold that in the near future technological developments will aid the emergence of super-intelligence and the merging of human and technology. For more details see the website of Singularity University, http://singularityu.org/ (accessed 4 July 2013).

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Another important issue that Braidotti notes is the different kind of ethical and political trajectories

that different posthumanisms take on. She stresses that quite often the post-anthropocentric thinkers

go towards the direction of responding to the challenges brought about by posthuman predicament

by offering neo-humanist alternatives, that lead them – on a normative level – back to the same-old

unified category of “the human” and universal humanist values (Braidotti, 2013: 78-80). As an

alternative she suggests to focus on affirmative politics of the posthuman, without reducing its

complexities or ignoring its paradoxes. Tying the different strands of posthumanist thought together,

she aims at putting the questions of subjectivity, ethics and politics back to the fore in science and

technology studies, while not surrendering to the nostalgia, technophobia or neo-humanism of

moral philosophies.

This being said, my own stance in the debate is much like Braidotti's. I wish to pay attention to the

role of information-communication technologies in their interaction with human embodiment,

borrowing from theories developed in science and technology studies and feminist theory, while

staying away from techno-utopianism, but likewise from technophobia. At the same time I do

believe that it is crucial not only to do the analysis, but also to point to the constraints and potentials

that are opened up by the kind of techno-embodiment that is at the core of body in e-porn. What is

at stake here is not only the theoretical conceptualization of human embodiment, but also the way it

is enacted and rendered susceptible to the new modes of power that are intensified by body-

technology coupling.

3.1. Posthumanist take on the body: re-defining matter and information

I would like to start with drawing some lines along which the de-stabilization of what counts as

human and human embodiment has taken place across the multiple brands of posthumanist thought.

Key markers for these lines are what traditionally has been left out of the definition of the human:

the non-human, be it the animal, technology, Earth, etc34. This non-human in Western humanism,

like the Woman in a patriarchal order, works not only as a category of difference, but also as that in

contrast to which the human is defined (Derrida, 2002). Traditionally the non-human has been seen

as something that lacks its own agency and can only be invested with it by the Human (think, for

example, about technology and the cliché that it is not technology that matters, but what we do with

it).

34 Woman, in a way, also partly falls into that category, if we consider that she has always been slightly less than

human, since Man was the ultimate embodiment of humanity.

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Lacking authentic agency then confines the non-human to passivity and further perpetuates the

dualism between (active) mind and (passive) matter/body. This proliferates the clear cuts between

any categories that relate to the Human and his embodiment as well as rises the fear of the

“infections” brought by the non-human entities (think about the unconscious fear of bacteria

invading the body, science-fiction horrors of machine taking over the world, of the unruly couplings

between organic and inorganic in technology, etc.).

Donna Haraway also stresses the indebtedness of humanity to these non-humans that are parts of

our every-day lives and thanks to whom our scientific, cultural and economic endeavours can go

further. She calls them “companion species” and highlights the multiple interconnectedness both

through space and time (Haraway, 2008). In her earlier work she also argued for an even closer

connection by developing a figuration of the cyborg (Haraway, 1986 [1991]). Through taking the

popular cyber-fiction figure and disclosing its potentials she provided solid grounds for re-thinking

the fleshy intermingle between the technological and the organic. Being so inextricably connected

to our technologies we are all cyborgs, either literally (through body aesthetic or medical body

improvements) or figuratively (by relying on technologies to be able to function effectively in the

daily life).

Haraway's figuration of the cyborg also highlights that human body is not really entirely “human,”

i.e. made of organic matter, integral and “pure.” In other words, human body is not made up of

entirely human elements. A closer look at human biology opens the question not only of the

category of the human, but also its embodiment and sexuality. Take, for example, sexual

reproduction as the site that provides ground for the distinction between sexes and idea of the

“normal” sexuality: certain reproductive sexual organs constitute sexes in the human world as well

as define what counts as sex (reproductive penis-vagina intercourse). Luciana Parisi shows that this

sexual reproduction is only one sort of reproduction that goes on in the body. Other sorts of non-

sexual reproduction that she calls “bacterial sex” are inextricable from the processes that take place

in every single (human/organic) being (Parisi, 2004).

Her account poses a challenge to at least two ideas at once: firstly, confinement of sex to sexual

reproduction and thus clearly demarcated sexual identities; and secondly, the “purity” of the human

body, the idea of it as most developed, “better” sort of body on the evolutionary line. This renders

clear how the non-human operates as a shaper of what gets to be counted as human, but also how

ignoring the non-human part of the human leads to narrowing down the possibilities of human

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expression.

However, some posthumanists argue that this is still too anthropocentric. For instance, in his book

Alien Phenomenology, or What's It Like to Be a Thing? (2012) Ian Bogost claims that we should

stop asking questions about human experience, and turn to the phenomenology of things. Human-

world relationship, according to Bogost, is just one particular kind of relationship between two

entities. Drawing on Graham Harman he says that “hammer, human, haiku, and hot dog are all

ready-to-hand and present-at-hand for one another as much as they are for us” (2012: 16). In other

words, things (and by things he means both material and immaterial entities) relate to each other

and to environment not only through human action but also independently of it. They also structure

their own environments in their own ways, thus we should speak about plurality of environments

rather than employ such over-arching concepts as “the world”.

The latter argument resonates with another posthumanist: Cary Wolfe, whose book What is

Posthumanism? (2010) was one of the major attempts to outline some possible interpretations of

what can be regarded as “posthumanist thought”. He calls “the environment” a “multidimensional

space” since each autopoietic system (that includes humans, animals and other non-human others)

structures its own environment through its embodied enaction. Even though Wolfe and Bogost have

their own differences (most notably Wolfe's reliance on activity as the focal point of any system,

while Bogost claims that studies of life, couplings and inter/action are overvalued in comparison to

studying entities as they are), they both seem to be thinking in terms of less strictly demarcated and

ontologically hierarchized units.

However, if Wolfe goes further into the analysis of complex autopoietic systems, Bogost calls for

something he coins “posthuman phenomenology” or “phenomenology for” as opposed to the

traditional “phenomenology of” (Bogost, 2012). Though obviously we cannot exactly experience

what it means to be a thing, we can learn about it by observing how things relate to their

environments. According to Bogost, this would entail engaging in speculative realism – in

observing and speculating on phenomena and acknowledging that these speculations (such as how

computers structure their environments, not to mention what it means to think from a position of a

microchip) may be impossible to verify.

Ian Bogost, together with other contemporary thinkers such as Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton and

Quentin Meillassoux, are coming from a new strand of philosophy called “object-oriented

ontology” (OOO) that attempts to strip the human of its ontological privileges and assert the equal

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existence of all objects and their relations35. However, this kind of posthumanism, in my opinion, is

precisely the brand that Braidotti criticizes for flattening out of structural differences and complex

power relations at work. Her own brand of critical posthumanism or feminist posthumanism does

not in itself contradict OOO, but rather goes a different direction: acknowledging the structural

relationality and vitality of matter (thus also bodies), she rather asks how does that affect

contemporary human condition, remaining sensible to the fact that this “human” cannot be seen as a

universal and privileged category anymore (Braidotti, 2013: 30-5).

The relationality and affectivity of matter, its core vitality, gets reconfigured via new bio- and

information-communication technologies. Drawing on the article of media scholar Eugene Thacker,

Patricia T. Clough argues that because of modern biotechnologies media cut to the very core of

biological matter and thus also human bodies (Clough, 2010). Thacker in his article “Data Made

Flesh” (2003) shows that especially with the birth of cybernetics bodies are seen as operating

according to the same logic of feedback loops and information dynamics. Even more than that:

DNA researchers manipulate biological matter with the help of computer software, with

applications as far reaching as artificial growth of separate organs, thus inscribing the cybernetic

logics of information into matter itself.

What both Clough and Tacker highlight is that not only bodies can in some ways “incorporate”

technologies, but also that the very matter of the body is seen as operated and thus manageable

through and as technology. Mater itself is informational: it is self-organising, dynamic and

affective (Clough, 2010). This opens a new direction to think about human-technology relation

without presenting the human as the main point of reference. It also allows to blur the distinction

between human and machine because informationality of matter means the possibility of the flow of

affect within as well as between different bodies. This process is not at all power-free: capitalism

thrives on genetic material and tools of biomedia are quickly appropriated in order to manipulate

and control matter itself. It is an important point precisely because it prevents techno-utopias and

also reveals that power relations can saturate the very basic level of life – something that

phenomenology has been prone to ignore, as many feminist and postcolonial critics have shown

(Braidotti, 2013).

Informationality of matter and thus also bodies makes it hard to maintain the phenomenological

35 For a very simplified definition of OOO, see Ian Bogost's blog entry “What is Object-Oriented Ontology? A

Definition for Ordinary Folk” at Ian Bogost blog, http://www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog.shtml (accessed 5 July 2013).

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lines of the body-proper. As media theorists Mitchell and Thurtle put it, the phenomenological body

“too often reifies the body as the “zero point” of sense experience and does little to help us

understand the integrity of mediated experience in linking and transforming bodily interaction. The

cultural dimensions of mediated experience end up as a problem that begs explanation, rather than

being understood as a reverberant and active part of embodied experience” (Mitchell and Thurtle,

2004: 5). In addition to that, phenomenology often enforces the dividing line between the human

and the technology – one can incorporate the other, make it part of their embodiment but the

ultimate ontological distinction remains. Coupled with the “tradition” to take difference as

pejoration (Braidotti, 2013), this ontological demarcation often leads to asymmetry between the

non-human and human, and thus makes human perspective the organising principle of experience

and the world.

As I see it, it is the problem that has as much to do with ontological assumptions as well as with the

way of analysis itself, and specifically the units of analysis. Phenomenology does start from the

human body-as-organism, building further its insights on how this embodiment relates to and is

modified by other objects, contexts, discourses. Clough and Thacker, on the other hand, start from

matter itself and Donna Haraway starts from “knots” and “folds”: “the infoldings of others to each

other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things”

(2006: 176). I would like to combine this sensitivity to the level of matter and how it is reconfigured

as informational, with the idea that things – or knots and folds – come into being through and within

relations (Hayles, 2004). This double move of zooming-in on matter and zooming-out on relations

will allow me to show how bodies in e-porn are relational sexual beings of flesh and wires.

3.2. Techno-embodiment in online porn: media, porn and politics

Embodied “practice” approach to online porn and posthumanist thought has profound implications

to how we think about the whole phenomenon of wired, mediated sex enacted through conjunction

with technology. It points to the body as a primary gateway to mediated sexually explicit images,

yet such body is not a clearly defined entity that utilizes technology as a mere passive tool: its

embodiment is enacted in relation to the technology that brings pornography to its users. Thus

human body in online pornography is re-constituted as a technobody: technology is at the core of its

embodiment, but also of its sex and sexuality. Bodies in e-porn then are technobodies who come to

enact their mediated sexuality online. Bodies in e-porn are technobodies becoming sexual in and

through relation with technology. By this I do not mean to imply that bodies become sexual only by

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engaging in online pornography. Rather, I am claiming that online pornography is one of the

spheres where human sexuality is constituted and enacted as mediated, and human embodiment as

technologized.

This mediatedness of sexuality and technological embodiment is grounded in the relationality and

informationality of matter itself. E-porn thus becomes a space where this ontological relationality is

played out in and through the practices of consumption, inscribing technobodies in power and

economic structures. Thus there are multiple questions to be asked: what modes of power are

technobodies in e-porn susceptible to? What possibilities does e-porn open for creators of

pornography that aim at challenging the mainstream narratives and gender roles? How can

becoming a (techno)body in e-porn allow women – subjects who have, on the one hand, always

fallen on the body-side of the mind/body split, but also who have been shamed because of their

carnality – to explore and enact their desires? Where does the discourse on sex and sexuality, as

well as on gender roles, come into play and how does it work in a digital environment?

The informational flows of vulnerability

First of all, there is an important point to be made about the economy of online porn. Rosi Braidotti

claims that pornography re-enforces the logics of market economy (Braidotti, 2011a). Capitalism is

well know for incorporating movements and ideas that started as radical and subversive. It also

feeds on the production and consumption of affects (Terranova, 2004). E-porn is no exception here:

for instance, if at the beginning the phenomenon of “amateur porn” – low-cost home-made sex

tapes uploaded or otherwise shared online – created an alternative space for San Fernando Valley

productions36, nowadays large porn corporations issue “amateur collections” to squeeze some profit

out of the supposedly “real”, “unfaked” and “unscripted” qualities that amateur porn is said to

exhibit (van Doorn, 2010).

More than that: since capitalism turns matter itself into a mode and source of production (Braidotti,

2013, Clough, 2010) and employs bodily labour via digital environments (Terranova, 2004;

Paasonen, 2010), embodiment – including sexuality – becomes one of the main sources of

commodification as well as the field which is constructed as commodity. In the business of e-porn

the number of orgasms almost directly translates into profit: website views generate traffic, which in

36 San Fernando Valley is where adult entertainment production is concentrated in the US, generating around 90 percent of all US adult films produced (source: HBO documentary TV series Pornucopia, 2004).

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turn generates income from advertising. And yet interestingly, if categorization in e-porn can be any

indicator, not all orgasms have the same value: from several major free porn websites that I have

been drawing my illustrations from (RedTube.com, Youporn.com, PornTube.com and

PornHub.com), only PornHub.com has a category labelled as “female friendly” porn.

The visceral affective grab that e-porn employs, practices of browsing and the failure to deliver the

“real thing” (Williams, 1989: 19) further perpetuates the craving that begs and always fails to be

fulfilled, thus resulting in more “clicks”, more pop-up ads – a situation perhaps best illustrated by

one internet commentator comparing porn to the image of a pizza in the ad and upon delivery (see

figure 4).

Figure 4: Porn before/after masturbation

Source: http://imgur.com/gallery/oqcBL

Furthermore, e-porn fuels “perverse capitalism” (Braidotti, 2013: 61) not only – or perhaps rather

not so much – by fuelling sexual drive, but by framing this drive towards a certain direction and

suggesting particular practices that would lead to its supposed satisfaction. As Atwood and Smith's

preliminary research findings show (Atwood, Smith et.al., 2012), consumers look for porn both

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when they “feel horny” as well as when they “want to feel horny,” which implies the expectation of

online porn to satisfy this “horniness”. The way satisfaction is suggested – go online, find a video,

masturbate, orgasm – creates a very simplified and limited imaginary of what one can do with one's

sexual craving. Thus if e-porn deterritorializes bodies, as show in chapter 2, through inserting them

into informational loops and non-linear time-spaces, this popular narrative of “easy satisfaction” re-

territorializes it again by functionally connecting sexuality, network technology, pornographic

imagery and specific body parts (“click*fap, fap, fap”).

E-porn also feeds into the capitalist logic by proliferating differences which are structured as

“identities” or “preferences” and packaged as consumer choices (Braidotti, 2013: 58). Classifying

each and every single video under one or several categories allows for identification of these

choices and further multiplication of them. This is not simply a matter of convenience or sales – as

Foucault has shown (1995), classification systems are easily used for management of “perversions.”

As a result, popular discourse attempts to single out “the good kind” of porn from the perverse and

censurable, or “wrong” yet tolerable. For instance, the UK “porn ban” suggests that “rape porn”

should be completely banned, while however not specifying, whether the definition of “rape porn”

also implies BDSM practices that can potentially include rape role-play scenes37. Other discourses

attempt to acknowledge the supposedly “general” idea that porn is smut, while noting that, however,

“it's not that all porn is evil”38.

The fragmentation and multiplicity that, as I have shown in chapter 2, are so prominent in online

porn, can be good starting points to think through the non-unity and non-fixity of (human) bodies

and subjectivities. On the other hand, they also allow for the proliferation of “disposable bodies”

(Braidotti, 2011b). Technobodies in e-porn being fragmented, standardized into categories and

multiplied through exponential growth in number on and off screen, become both easily

interchangeable and “usable.” These disposable bodies populate online porn spaces, such as free-

access porn website RapeTube4U.com and PunishTube.com that border on a very thin line between

consensual sex and actual footage of sexual violence. In both cases it is the women whose bodies

are used and abused, and it is very doubtful that all of them are “professional actors and models” as

the disclaimers on the websites proclaim. 37 Different sides of the debate are well highlighted in the articles “Don't ban rape porn – introduce more porn with

negotiation and boundary setting”, http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/dont-ban-rape-porn--introduce-more-porn-with-negotiation-and-boundarysetting-8727612.html (accessed on 12 August 2013) and “Should accessing 'rape pornography' be restricted by law?”, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/24/accessing-rape-pornography-restricted-law (accessed on 12 August 2013).

38 “Porn is not a bad thing, but letting fantasy impact reality is” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/9928261/Porn-is-not-a-bad-thing-but-letting-fantasy-impact-reality-is.html, accessed on 12 August 2013).

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In a way, online porn is a space of technobodies of what Deleuze calls “dividuals” (as opposed to

“individuals”) – re/shapeable, de-/trans-formable entities entangled in the networks and workings of

power and, most importantly: malleable (Deleuze, 1992). Particular outline of “porn tubes” collides

a variety of different fragmented bodies into one collage of images (see chapter 2), while the

experience of browsing (“stumbling through”) and immersion in an informational space in general

puts them in the constant stream of videos. This malleability manifests not only in the body

becoming one flash of the flesh in the abundance of online porn, certain body parts rendered as

random points to stumble upon, comment on, enjoy, be disgusted by. I suggest that malleability is at

the core of phenomena such as “porno chic” - the performance of gendered identity of a “porn star”

in popular culture and fashion39, and it is difficult not to wonder about resonances between the

“ideal” image of the genitals as seen in porn, and the increasing number of labiaplasties and

vaginoplasties worldwide40. This is perhaps the most direct and, dare I say, the most banal

perversion of “self styling” that R. Braidotti speaks of when she discusses the potentials of a

relational, non-unitary posthuman subject (Braidotti, 2013).

Yet even if technobodies in the space of e-porn are fragmented, circulated together with and

alongside the information flows, capital-generating and malleable, there is still a question to ask: is

this all that a technobody can do when it goes online to enact its mediated sexual embodiment? Are

there any points that would yield political potential in fragmentation and becoming a dividual

(Deleuze, 1992)?

Towards the affirmative politics of sexual technobodies

In her discussion of the affirmative vision of the posthuman as becoming-machine Rosi Braidotti

eloquently draws the lines of potential that are engendered in technology constituting an

inextricable part of human milieu. She argues that:

[t]echnological mediation is central to a new vision of posthuman subjectivity and it

39 Annette Lynch has recently published a book on this phenomenon – see Lynch, 2013. 40 Vaginaplasty and labiaplasty are re-constructive surgeries of the vagina and the labia, respectively. If the former is

often done in order to deal with injuries from child-birthing, the latter is more of a cosmetic surgery, usually done to reduce the inner labia in order to make it more “discrete”. For an insightful journalistic investigation into possible interconnections between censorship, porn magazines, and labiaplasty in Australia, see Kirsten Drysdale and Ali Russell's video “Labiaplasty”, aired on ABC1 channel Hungry Beast on March 1, 2010. Also partly available on Vimeo at: http://vimeo.com/10883108, and Youtube at: http://youtu.be/pK9GtT-khb0 (accessed on 12 August 2013).

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provides the grounding for new ethical claims. A posthuman notion of the enfleshed and

extended, relational self keeps the techno-hype in check by a sustainable ethics of

transformations … The emphasis on immanence allows us to respect the bond of mutual

dependence between bodies and technological others, while avoiding the contempt for the

flesh and the trans-humanist fantasy of escape from the finite materiality of the enfleshed

self … I want to argue for a vitalist view of the technologically bio-mediated other. This

machinic vitality is not so much about determinism, inbuilt purpose or finality, but rather

about becoming and transformation. (Braidotti, 2013: 90-91).

She indicates three major elements for sustainable politics of the posthuman, which I would like to

apply for the analysis of potentials of the technobody in e-porn. Braidotti argues that it is through

non-functional and non-profit experimentations with what technobodies and mediated selves can do

that the possibilities for sustainable future are opened up. In addition to that, she also highlights the

importance of “collectively shared, community-based praxis” (ibid.: 100), through which

alternative scenarios can be enacted. I would also like to add that this praxis and extended notion of

the body as technobody points to a source of embodied and bodily agency that does not reside in the

atomised individual or Cartesian subject of reason, but rather is distributed across the organic and

inorganic, material and semiotic, individual and collective.

This re-defines agency as a transindividual phenomenon, to use Gilbert Simondon's term. Simondon

suggests that instead of thinking about entities or beings we should rather focus on relations and

processes as a dimension of being (Simondon, 1992). He thus calls the variety of these processes an

“ontogenesis” (ibid.: 300), and argues that it entails (but is not exhausted by) a process of psychic

and collective individuation. The category of a transindividual is that which accounts for “the

systematic unity of internal individuation (psychic) and external individuation (collective)” (ibid.:

307).

Transindividual is not a collective entity as such but rather spans across the collective and the

individual, inside-out and outside-in like a Möbius strip, tapping into the pre-individual potential,

but also the dimension of the social/collective (Combes, 2012). Furthermore, it points to practices

as a field of emergence, rather than fixed essences. As Adrian Mackenzie explains, transindividual

“moves the focus away from the split between devices and bodies toward a less visible but vital

middle ground of material practices” (Mackenzie, 2002: 118), since it weaves together corporeality,

technology and temporality. Transindividual, thus, is a way of conceptualizing experience without

giving priority to the single established individual, nor a totality of the social (ibid.).

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The notion of transindividual is also important because it suggests a different kind of causal relation

and directionality. Instead of induction or deduction, Simondon suggests to think of transduction – a

process “in which an activity gradually sets itself in motion, propagating within a given area,

through a structuration of the different zones of the area over which it operates” (Simondon, 1992:

313). It begins with activity and extends itself outwards and inwards, without denying the

specificity of different elements or environments, but rather working through them, allowing

different actors in the process to be articulated together. In this respect transduction is the same

what Barad calls an “intra-action” or what Brian Massumi describes as “analog contagion”

(Massumi, 2011:64).

Let me propose some examples where these affirmative politics of a technobody are enacted in and

through mediated sex online. For instance, in their work performance artist Maria Llopis and the

GirlsWhoLike-porno collective41, while acknowledging that fragmentation and exposure can be a

source of victimization, attempt to find ways to make it a source of empowerment. Llopis' online

performance “Meat/ing the Internet” (2011)42 weaves together vision and touch, shared collectively

through technology, effectively producing a body in e-porn, a flesh wired with desire. The

performers and audience were invited to engage in online sex with random people through live

video-chat platforms (that are very often used for cybersex with strangers) CAM4.com,

Chatroulette.com and Manroulette.com. The viewers on the other side of the screen were able to see

the audience and masturbate together with performers, while the images from performer's laptops

were also projected on screens in the performance space. In this way “Meat/ing the Internet”

allowed for multiple elements to transduce (the network, the multiple images of bodies, present in

the space, and on the screens, images of bodies mediated through webcams), cutting through the

private/public, producer/consumer, performer/viewer distinctions, and establishing all these spaces

as collective spaces of sexuality.

Another interesting example of what technobodies can do is Porno terrorism or guerrilla porn.

Porno terrorism is a type of performance or visual material (quite often both) that uses sexually

explicit imagery, and even visual and narrative codes from the mainstream pornography, to convey

a certain political – in the broadest sense of the word – message. These range from invading the

41 See http://girlswholikeporno.com/ (accessed on 12 August 2013) 42 “Meat/ing the internet,” a performance hosted by Maria Llopis, Ariel Efraim Ashbel and Jürgen Brüning, presented

at Berlin Porn Film Festival 2011. Several photos of performance are available at http://www.mariallopis.com/en/portfolio/meating-in-the-internet/ (accessed on 12 August 2013).

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Energy Summit and staging a stylized sex act43, to reading poetry while masturbating, or addressing

the issues of gender norms, violence etc. while having sex or being sexually stimulated44. Even

though quite a bit of these performances were designed to be enacted on stage, they are freely

distributed in user-generated content websites such as Vimeo or Youtube, or on blogs. I read these

performances as directly high-jacking the standardized functionality of pornography and sexuality

in general, i.e. its use for consumption of bodily pleasure only.

Both M. Llopis' performances and porno terrorism can be seen as part of the PostPorn movement

(that especially active in Spain – references are provided in the webography). PostPorn performers,

such as Llopis herself or Beatriz Preciado, are taking the phenomenon of transindividuation up and

focusing on it in search for potentials that it engenders. One of the key figures in this movement –

Tim Stüttgen – writes about the subversive potential of porn: “where there is repetition, there is

difference. Where there is power, there is counter-power. And where there is forced totality, there is

something that fleets” (Stüttgen 2009: 42). Thus artists as well as researchers dealing with post-porn

focus on non-reproductive, non-functional sexuality, and highlight the exploration of the potential

of the body to de-stabilize sociodiscursive structures.45

One of the most interesting examples of collective praxis that aims at affirmation and exploration is

appropriation of e-porn technological structures by queer communities at Queerporntube.com. The

structure of this free-access website is based on the same template as e-porn websites that I have

analysed in the second chapter: video thumbnails aligned in rows, side-bar advertisements, special

“user sections” for registered users, possibility to comment under the videos, “like” them, filter the

videos based on categories (ranging from “hardcore” to “gender queer,” “hetero non-normative,”

“just because,” “sexy education,” “solo showing off” etc.), time of upload, number of views and so

on (see figures 6 and 7). Even though there are quite a few videos that are “teasers” of DVD

releases, a considerable amount of content is user-generated and produced in a DYI fashion.

In Queerporntube.com the same dispositif of e-porn produces a space that is open for creative,

experimental and non-functional enactment of mediated sexuality and techno-embodiment. First of

all, the non-integrity, the malleability and fragmentation of the bodies in e-porn here become

sources of potential to explore the embodiment and sexuality of the bodies that are already

considered “non-normative”: the differently racialized, sexed and abled queer bodies. With the help

43

“Oil Orgy” Invades Energy Summit, http://www.petethetemp.co.uk/?p=297, 5-1-2012. 44 Videos by the collective Pornoterrorismo http://pornoterrorismo.com/mira/video-de-performances/ (5-1-2012). 45 For a good overview of the contemporary development of PostPorn movement, see essays in Post/Porn/Politics (ed. Stüttgen, b_books, 2009).

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of personal cameras and network, users plug their sex lives and drives online, not only filming

“scenarios,” but also videotaping specifically for the e-porn space – an illustration of which are the

videos labelled as “Solo showing off” and “Masturbation.” The imaginative approach to the

question “what a technobody can do?” is also exemplified in the kind of (usually queer) e-porn that

is slowly becoming a genre of its own: bike smut,46 as well as exploratory performances by

genderqueer, trans folk and kink-lovers.

In addition to that, videos that are not specifically aiming at arousing the viewer are not that rare on

Queerporntube.com. Calls for different sexual politics, educational videos on consent, fisting, DYI

sex tools and many other topics included along the explicitly sexual ones makes this particular e-

porn space

Figure 6: The layout and structure of Queerporntube.com (1)

into a realm that traverses private/public distinction highlighting the inter-connectedness of politics,

sexuality and embodiment in a fashion that is affirmative rather than constricting, and practice-

based rather than descriptively normative. Queerporntube.com, as I see it, aims at “playful and

pleasure-prone relationship to technology that is not based on functionalism” (Braidotti, 2013: 91),

46 See, for instance, a video “whatsBikeSmut” (http://queerporntube.com/watch_video.php?v=YY3H3HBARXX1,

accessed on 12 August 2013), that celebrates the erotics of bicycles and human bodies.

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and highlights practices of exploration and relationality: in the end it is the practice of plugging

oneself online into a mediated space in order to get back to one's own body, access and take part in

the shared discursive and networked space, and relate to the bodies of others, that makes

Queerporntube.com a sustainable project.

It is important to remember that pornography has a long-lasting tradition of acting as a form of

cultural critique (Paasonen et al., 2007) but also – and especially queer pornographies – of bonding.

Ingrid Ryberg calls such a public-subjective space of porn an “intimate publics” (Ryberg, 2013). I

argue that these intimate publics, an example of which is Queerporntube.com, for instance, are

based on transindividual relations in that they mingle intimate lived experience of queer bodies with

publicity of the network and common pornographic codes, as well as politicality of the different

techno-embodiments. What is important here is that just as pornography in general, according to

Williams, implants perversions with the help of cinema, so these videos try to implant ideas or

make statements, or simply affirm the sexual pleasure experienced by “deviant” bodies by using the

very same logic and technologies that are used in internet porn: DYI, making the private public, and

a certain degree of depersonalisation/fragmentation.

Figure 7: The layout and structure of Queerporntube.com (2)

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Finally, spaces of e-porn have potential to re-define agency as a transindividual, distributed quality.

A great example to illustrate that is a website ishotmyself.com.47 The latter specifically promotes

self-production of the content either with a regular photo camera, or video camera. The emphasis is

placed on representing sexuality in a way that would “subvert the paradigm” of pornographic

representations, in order to reveal the value of “human form and imagination”48 in a way that is

appealing, erotic and empowering for the creator of the content herself. The fact that this is done

with the help of digital technology (the network, the camera) is crucial: it is the working with/in the

technological on a very intimate level that produces the embodied sexual agency in this case. This

working with/in is, I claim, is the core which the ethics of technobodies derive from.

What is highlighted throughout the latter example as well as those examined above, is that sexual

agency of an embodied and embedded human subject is re-constituted through close intra-action

with technologies. Furthermore, this agency is distributed through the image-body-technology

assemblage, rather than “owned” by the human subject. In other words, the “I can”, emphasized by

Lerder (see chapter 1) is shifting: the “I” is not identical with the body, and the “can” is not identical

with the “I”. And sexuality of this embodied non-self-identical “I” gets de- and re-territorialized in

e-porn, highlighting that it, too, is a process, rather than a fixed category (Braidotti, 2013).

To conclude, posthumanism destabilises the category of the human and its embodiment by

highlighting other bodies at play (machinic, animal, discursive), as well as their inextricability from

human bodies. Technological “others” are at the heart of what gets to count as human and as a body,

and their inter-mingle. Online porn becomes one of these technological environments that re-

constitutes human embodiment as techno-embodiment and highlights the mediatedness of sexuality.

This is not an unambiguous phenomenon: while challenging ontological dualisms, techno-bodies

also get fragmented, commodified, rendered disposable. Yet I would like to see it as a paradoxical

contemporary state that humans are in, a part of posthuman predicament, that further propels critical

theory and ethical accountability through the focus on relationality and sustainable practices.

47 See http://www.ishotmyself.com. I am aware that it is actually a paid-membership website, contrary to the ones I

explored or mentioned before, that mixes both photos and videos. However, I am using this example here because: firstly, the content of this website is first and foremost user-generated. Secondly, it is hosted by a company (Feck) dedicated to facilitating content-distribution, and strive to employ a minimal amount of editing/selection of the videos and photos that are submitted (this information is based on a private conversation conducted in 2011). Finally, it encourages self-exposure, yet also urges the contributors to experiment with porn/art/erotica in a creative and non-normative way.

48See the section “About” at: http://www.ishotmyself.com/public/general.php?p=about (accessed on 12 August 2013).

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CONCLUSION. FOR THE ETHICS OF WORKING WITH/IN

In this thesis I engaged with the question of embodiment in online pornography, and specifically

with how embodiment gets enacted and re-defined through enaction in the space of “tube” porn

websites – a space which I coined e-porn space. In other words, I asked: what happens to the bodies

when they practice sex with networked images online? And how do these practices change the

conceptual and political landscapes within which these bodies are to be seen? Finally, what kind of

potentials and constraints do these bodies encounter in the realm of online pornography?

I attempted to answer these questions by looking at e-porn through the practices of its consumption

and their medium-specificity. The “practice approach” to pornography, employed mostly by anti-

porn feminists, goes a different direction than a “discourse/speech approach” that is more notable in

pro-pornography, pro-sex or anti-censorship brand of feminist thought. While not willing to strictly

take sides, I believe – and attempted to show – that practice approach can be a very productive

theoretical framework to work through the question of embodiment in online porn, precisely

because it focuses on material practices as well as their phenomenological implications, without

denying the discursive element of these practices (Mason-Grant, 2004).

I paired this practice-based, body-oriented approach to porn with phenomenological accounts of

media and technology. These accounts, and most notably Mark Hansen's (2004, 2006)

enactive/embodied view of technology, highlight that the sensibilities of movement and touch,

which are at the core of what is called “the body schema,” provide the basis of seeing embodiment

as co-evolving with technologies. More than that: technologies, and especially new media/digital

technologies, have the potential not only to provide space for enactment of embodiment, but also

productively de-territorialize it and expand the potential of the human body.

Both practice approach to porn, and embodied approach to digital media highlight the relational

aspect of body–technology as well as body–pornography interaction. To capture this relationality as

well as the interconnections between media and pornography and how these relations involve and

influence embodiment, I used the framework of dispositif as a complex structure composed of basic

apparatus, mode of address and viewing situation to analyse pornographic tube websites online.

Furthermore, the theory of dispositif allowed me to focus on embodied practices of consumption

and related discourses on a sort of “meta-level,” instead of sticking to the analysis of specific genre

or patterns of representation, which seems to be a common approach to pornography in general, and

has been done extensively in feminist research of the field.

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My analysis of the dispositif of e-porn, with a particular focus on how it engages embodiment

through movement and touch, revealed that tube websites constitute an informational space

(Terranova, 2004), which is fragmented, indeterminate, excessive and immersive at the level of

basic apparatus. This space and its excessiveness is managed through tools such as categorizations.

In its turn it influences the mode of address that characterizes e-porn: instead of slowly seducing the

viewer, e-porn tires to “grab” them (Paasonen, 2010) by using visceral appeal, and exposure.

However, I also noted that simple exposure, the “will to know” (Williams, 1989) how sex happens

is not enough anymore: e-porn aims at experimenting with bodily boundaries and abilities,

resonating with the “jackass” (or “fucked up”) and “fail” phenomena that are part of contemporary

web 2.0. culture.

E-porn also relies on prosumerist aspect of this culture, encouraging and feeding off the blurring of

the lines between producer and consumer, performer and viewer. Thus the viewing situation (or

perhaps it should be called “consuming situation” in this case) of the consumer of e-porn makes

them invested in the networked sex, even if this investment manifests simply as generating web

traffic. The specifics of the basic apparatus as an informational space and mode of address of

affective grab leave the consumer in a radically unstable situation of discursive overload,

rhythmically moving through space through touching, and touching this space through moving.

Encouraged to self-expose in a space that cuts across public/private divide, implicated in the

informational loops of data, always leaving a trace and collecting traces of passing intensities in

their own bodies, consumers are rendered in a state of inhabiting a mixed-reality that is radically

unstable and de/re-composable.

This multi-layered dispositif of e-porn produces a body in e-porn: body whose sexuality is enacted

with and through technics, and whose embodiment is de- and re-territorialized through this

enactment in online porn. The body in e-porn is both a figuration to think about embodiment, as

well as a very material position of an embodied consumer. This figuration/position is of a body

wired with desire and plugged-in the informational loops. Body in e-porn is thus deterritorialized

through indeterminate and dynamic elements of e-porn, and re-territorialized again through e-porn's

constricting aspects, such as its functionalism (one goes online to masturbate) and strategies of

excess management (such as categorization). It is a malleable, mediated body, an experimental and

experimenting body, who is both constrained by standardized “digital smooth” and ruptured by the

“jackass” and “fucked up” cultures of mis-performed and failing bodies. Not to mention the

paradoxical discourses that frame bodies in e-porn as sinners/empowered ones, excessive and

70

erased at the same time. Bodies in e-porn are “contaminated” in and through the intra-action with

technology, and they ooze their bodily fluids, extend their flesh into technologies, thus effectively

“meating” the Internet.

However, the body in e-porn as a concept, a posthumanist critic would say, is still too caught-up in

the phenomenological “body-as-organism” perspective (Clough, 2010), thus not fully able to grasp

the implications of posthuman condition. This condition, marked (amongst other things) by rapid

advancement of information-communication and bio- technologies, points to the relationality and

vitality of matter (Braidotti, 2013). I argued that this needs to be given considerable amount of

attention in order point both the enabling and constricting lines of power that permeate the space of

e-porn. In order to do that I proposed that bodies in e-porn are technobodies that enact their

mediated sexuality and technologized embodiment in the sphere of e-porn. A body in e-porn in this

light then is re-defined as a relational form that technobodies enter into while consuming

pornography online.

The political implications of techno-embodiment are crucial here. The kind of power that operates

in the sphere of e-porn is diagrammatical: it is tacit, saturating, yet also leaving spaces for

subversion and for the unexpected. The most important points of negative power or potestas

(Braidotti, 2011a) in e-porn come from the capitalist logics that turn sexuality into a very profitable

commodity. Number of views generate website traffic, which almost directly links the number of

orgasms with capital flows, retaining the lines of difference yet multiplying them by categorizations

in the name of profit. This not only encourages a sort of mindless consumption of e-porn (which in

popular discourse is framed as “addiction” and blamed on porn itself rather than economic system),

but also proliferates “disposable bodies” that are mostly female, and confines human sexuality as

well as specific body parts to strictly functional purpose (even if that purpose in e-porn practices is

not sexual reproduction). In the system of advanced capitalism technobodies are again revealed as

malleable, re-/shapeable, and manageable as such – the bodies of dividuals (Deleuze, 1992).

However, I believe it is crucial – and not least because of the public outcries against pornography as

“perversion” of “natural” sexuality – to indicate the lines of different politics for and of

technobodies wired with desire, to draw contours of ethical and affirmative enaction of techno-

embodiment and its mediated sexuality. I claimed that these lines are opened up by asking whether

this is all that a techno-body can do. Focusing on appropriation of the same media technologies

(tube porn websites) by queer communities, performance artists, post-porn activists and guerrilla

porn “fighters,” I argued that there is affirmation and potentia to be found in the same malleability

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and fragmentation of techno-bodies by re-defining agency as distributed across the

organic/inorganic, private/public, human/non-human divides. Tapping into the transindividual

potential of distributed agency, the key ethical imperative would be to switch to the mode of

creative working with/in technology to experiment with the capacities of the relationality of techno-

embodiment.

To conclude, the practice-oriented approach to pornography, paired with embodied approach to

media and technologies, also invites us to re-think the status of pornography itself. Since sexually

explicit imagery is inextricable from the media, it calls both pro-porn and anti-porn feminist

activists to take into account not only the semantic meanings of pornographic texts, but also the

modes of their consumption. I would suggest that it would be helpful to see pornography as a

complex dispositif of practices and representations that combines multiple elements, one of which

is technological. Thus also a more complex account of the affectivity of porn, i.e. how it affects its

viewers, is needed – an account that would consider not only the affectivity of the content of

pornography as representations, but also of the technological apparatus that mediates them.

Media studies, and especially its phenomenological branch, I suggest, should take seriously the

challenges and complications that are posed by posthuman condition, and especially the

implications of this condition to power relations and their role in structuring and managing human

experiences. It is an open question, of course, whether phenomenology should not actually just stay

with the human experience to keep its methodological and conceptual focus. However,

experimentations with new brands of phenomenology (a “posthuman phenomenology”, perhaps?)

that would remain sensitive to human condition and power differentials, could open possibilities

that are yet to be explored.

Finally, even though I did not touch specifically upon the question of sexed embodiment and female

embodiment in particular, I suggest that in the light of the resurfacing debates on porn and

censorship, the exploration of what a female technobody can do in online space of mediated sex, is

much needed. Women's bodies, as I have pointed out, are still the ones that make the majority of

disposable bodies in e-porn. This rises questions both about practices of the consumption of

mediated sex, as well as politics of representation. What kind of imaginaries a female technobody

would generate, both in e-porn practices and feminist theory? What kind of sources of potentia and

potestas would it be able to tap into? What kind of sustainable ethics she would propose? In the face

of these questions I would call for replacing the exclamation “next!” with a more invigorating “to

be continued.”

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Free-access tube-websites: - www.youporn.com - www.porntube.com - www.redtube.com - www.pornhub.com - www.xhamster.com - www.forcetube.com - www.rapetube4u.com - www.punishtube.com - www.Daftporn.com - www.Heavy-r.com - www.E-fukt.com - www.queerporntube.com Other pornographic platforms: - www.chatroulette.com - www.manroulette.com - www.ishotmyself.com - http://girlswholikeporno.com/ - http://pornoterrorismo.com/mira/video-de-performances/ - post-porn activist Maria Llopis: http://www.mariallopis.com/en/

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Non-pornographic platforms: - http://failblog.cheezburger.com/ - http://knowyourmeme.com/ - www.urbandictionary.com - Singularity University, http://singularityu.org/