While we're on the theme of variations in group organization, there's the Rawlsian
conception of justice, one that may be appropriate given that pornography has
qualities about it (under certain conditions) of abuse. Taking Geert's reference to
Theweleit's writing (translated as two volumes under the title of "Male Fantasies"),
we would recognize the ways "fascistic language" expresses men's fears and desires
about women and develop principles of justice pertaining to collaborative work which
ensure opportunities for redress, etc. For Rawls, if we take "the original position"
(in which we do not know our own position in society, nor what our abilities are, what
our social or economic status is, working under the assumption that our enemy would
assign us our position), we would allow for inequalities only under conditions in which
the least advantaged (which could be you) benefit. But we would also give priority to
the principle of equal basic liberties, allowing us (in whatever socio-economic place
we occupy) to change our conception of the good and its implementation.
Readings Trebor's draft on teaching media in Buffalo, I was both deterred from
returning to this topic for which nobody really seems to get any credit reflecting on, and
surprised by the lack of responses here. For starters, I wonder what the implications
of the growing proportion of adjunct teaching is on the tenure system, no longer designed
to protect vulnerable radicals (who are as likely to be adjuncts) but serving as a kind of
coronation. The tension between student expectations in media training and the
instructor's greater vision is, I believe, more pronounced in an academic context that
lacks a progressive agenda, which holds for any discipline at all. This is part of a more
general move to formalization indicative of an unspoken conservative politics. And yet,
we constitute a collaborative group in the classroom, one that puts pressure on us
to compromise greater vision in the interest of good will, while insisting (in my view)
on a non-authoritarian method, no matter how much it may be demanded of us. (Here
is where teaching becomes a practice, more so than in the sharing of expertise, for
here is where models of discourse are demonstrated and some degree of responsibility
is felt by the student.)
Bernie Roddy
Katrien Jacobs <Katrien-*at*emerson.edu>; wrote:
I was thinking about Bion’s experiments with neurotics psychology. Bion seems to have observed that there are basic human performance modes that a group will veer towards, and that these will distract the group from carrying out a more sophisticated group assignment. One of these three basic modes is ”sex talk,” as individuals pair off in smaller units (or threesomes?) to discuss intimacies or share emotional experiences and have sex or sex talk.
I guess I am asking myself here– it is really necessary to “break through” such basic human performance modes when we carry out a sophisticated group plan? In the negative, when you are working within a group, and building towards something and suddenly, two or three people disappear to have some private moments of intimacy, and you hear them laughing and whispering and you are the alone-s, does it hurt the group? Or in the positive, can you only really be part of a group when you can be closer to some of its people, when the “talk” is a conduit to the heart of your intellectual curiosity, so you to stick to the group? For the more sensitive or casual people amongst us, that this kind of “sex talk” may be a kind of way of thinking about group collaboration that could be explored even if it doesn’t lead to anything much of a sophisticated product.
What are we doing with the aesthetics and politics of sex talk? Should we leave it alone? My own instinct and collaborative research experiments would tell me that one could build and document alliances and networks around sex talk. Sweet human gestures, amorous libidinal forces, bodily flows, porn images, building sexual energy and fantastic kinds of scenes-stories do not have to be a hindrance to the group. Human fantasies and libidinal flows are part of the online collaboration and they reveal a lot about power and politics. The soft or dreamy edge of the alone-s can build a logic of yearning and playfulness so s/he can build a fantastic environment for networked ideas.
I would like to find out if the fantasies we share and live on, the interruption of work with playful sexual or romantic gestures or the sharing of “p2p porn”** could be performed or communicated as a conduit to a group assignment within a collaborative network. Following the performance theory of Jon McKenzie, I believe that we live the era of a performance stratum, ruled by the axiom of ‘Perform Or Else.’ As Mc Kenzie writes: "Performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth, an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge" (McKenzie, 176) *** Performatives and performances are the building blocks of this stratum, developed in corporate-organizational settings as modes of efficiency, as creativity and competence in our dealings with machines and technologies, as a new aesthetics of social networking and cultural vitality. Work ethics, the use and knowledge of technologies, social and intellectual curiosities
intermingle and intersect to become strata of power and knowledge. Whereas nation-state governments and porn industries organize products around the older maxim of ‘pushing-down’ sex onto consumers or ‘punishing’ them for soliciting exploitative sex talk, the performance stratum thrives on a different type of consumerism. The performance stratum encourages consumers to embody experiences of organizing work and leisure around small social-sexual gestures that are moderated by peer-to-peer ethics and technological experimentation. Finally, sex talk or peer-to-peer porn as potential lubricants to an inspiring network Is also under close scrutiny from both governmental agencies and the porn industry.
___________
** What is p2p porn? In March 2003, US Congress initiated a crackdown on file-sharing programs or p2p networks because of their distribution of illegal types of porn. The General Accounting Office and The House Government Reform Committee came out with reports to prove that ‘Child pornography Is Readily Accessible Over Peer-to-Peer Networks.’ (GAO-03-537T) They performed surveillance tests on the networked computers of individuals and student communities and concluded that web users are at significant risk: “Juvenile users of peer-to-peer networks face a significant risk of inadvertent exposure to pornography when searching or downloading images.”(GAO-03-537T, p.11) To document the risk of inadvertent exposure to pornography, the GAO invited the Customs Cybersmuggling Center of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to perform searches on KaZaA and found indeed that child porn was being traded. The GAO’s ‘Child pornography Is Readily Accessible Over Peer-to-Peer Networks’ report
also mentions that the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the fiscal year of 2002 allocated $38.2 million and 228 agents to a ‘Innocent Images Unit’ and wants to collaborate with some of the peer-to-peer companies to solicit their cooperation in dealing with the issue of child pornography.(GAO-03-537, p.13)
This is the political backdrop for the ideas, a pervasive sex and porn hysteria that is damaging to network and autonomous zones. I am interested in thinking about offering sexuality and pornography to include these human sexual gestures that people share within a network, sometimes freely or as part of a commodity exchange. I see these gestures as “pornographic” because of the fact that networkers are linked to the fantasy lands created by commercial Internet porn and other pornographic trade zones. One could write some kind of fantastic story trying to locate the wings of desire of a network.
***Jon McKenzie _Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge 2001)