Digital Desire (South Atlantic Quarterly, 101.3 (2011).)

The

South Atlantic Quarterly

SAQ 110:3 • Summer 2011

Digital Desire Ellis Hanson, Special Issue Editor

The History of Digital Desire, vol. 1: An Introduction   583 Ellis Hanson Cell Phones from Hell   601 Steven Bruhm The Chora Line: RealD Incorporated   621 Caetlin Benson-­Allott Dirty Brides and Internet Settings: The Affective Pleasures and Troubles with Trash the Dress Photography Sessions   645 Michele White The Child as Pornographer   673 Ellis Hanson “You’ve got to get on to get off ”: Shortbus and the Circuits of the Erotic   693 Matthew Tinkcom “The consummation of the swallow’s wings”: A Zoo Story   715 Kevin Ohi

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A G A I N S T the D A Y

Liberal War Brad Evans, Editor

Note from the Editor   746 Michael Hardt The Liberal War Thesis: Introducing the Ten Key Principles of Twenty-­First-­Century Biopolitical Warfare   747 Brad Evans Total War as Environmental Terror: Linking Liberalism, Resilience, and the Bunker   757 Mark Duffield The Vulnerable Subject of Liberal War   770 Julian Reid Specters of Biopolitics: Finitude, Eschaton, and Katechon   780 Michael Dillon

Notes on Contributors   793

Ellis Hanson The History of Digital Desire, vol. 1: An Introduction

​In or about 1996, sex changed. For those with

Internet access, it started going more or less digital. Increasingly, it is going more or less digital whether you have Internet access or not and whether you like it or not. With the development of digital imaging, communication, data storage, and medical technology, there have been radical shifts in the way we experience, represent, and theorize about sexuality and desire. Members of generation Google, born digital, are coming of age now in an erotic terrain, online and off-­, that was scarcely imaginable before they were born. I say this with a degree of irony, knowing full well that there is no such thing as the “great paradigm shift” that changes everything everywhere once and for all. Change happens in different places and at different speeds, and old paradigms reassert and reconfigure themselves long after their invention and alleged extinction. I speak of this paradigm shift knowing that currently only about a quarter of Americans go online daily, though the personal images and information of a great many more Americans also are accessed daily, whether those Americans know it or not; that the Google Generation may not be as sleuthfully adept at Googling as was once believed; and that, with the world population around seven The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:3, Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-1275743 © 2011 Duke University Press

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billion, only about two billion are using the Internet, and the mere half-­ billion or so currently on Facebook are a privileged, if not always contented, minority. I speak of this shift knowing that Eng­lish remains the lingua franca of the Internet, even though it is not the native language of most of the people online. Nevertheless, if I had to pick a year for this shift, it would be 1996, a pivotal time for exploring the erotic potential of the Internet and for being scandalized by it: 1. In 1996, America Online opened its Instant Messaging and Buddy List options to all subscribers, and I was assailed by my first Buddy, a fellow subscriber of indeterminate sex, unknown to me, residing in a distant state, as I gathered from the profile, which was both too coy and too candid. 2. In 1996, we could log on to JenniCam, whose eponymous performance artist mounted an increasing number of webcams in an increasing number of private spaces in her dorm room and other apartments, so that we could watch, and eventually pay to watch, her every activity, however mundane, however sexual, thereby making domestic privacy seem merely passé. 3. In 1996, partly in response to a moral panic the year before, the U.S. government realized that the Internet had rendered pornography laws, including the exceptionally strict child-­pornography laws, virtually unenforceable, and so it responded with the Communications Decency Act, which was immediately challenged as an assault on free speech and a burden to educational institutions, as were its successors, the Child Online Protection Act (1998), the Children’s Internet Protection Act (2000), the PROTECT Act (2003) that has successfully outlawed erotic cartoons of children, and the Deleting Online Predators Act (2006). These Internet censorship laws, including especially stringent ones in Canada, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, and the UK, are still difficult to enforce, and very few predators have been, as if by the press of a computer key, deleted. 4. In 1996, the Communications Decency Act rendered credit-­card verification an attractive option to identify minors and thereby helped to spur an intense commercialization of Internet pornography purchasable with cards. 5. In 1996, Bennett Haselton created PeaceFire.org to preserve freedom of speech on the Internet, especially for minors, in reaction to the Communications Decency Act, and that same year, CYBERsitter included his organization on its list of “pornographic” sites. 6. In 1996, section 230 of the Communications Decency Act granted broad immunity to all interactive online services from certain types of legal

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liability for content created by others, thereby allowing the Internet chatroom, blog, or forum of your choice the freedom not to interfere when you use the site to expose, harass, and shame—sexually, easily, anonymously, brutally, unjustly, permanently, and very publicly—any person or institution you dislike. 7. In 1996, in the UK, the somewhat misleadingly named Internet Watch Foundation was founded to seek out and report to the police any illegal Internet pornography. 8. In 1996, Megan’s Law went into effect, mandating that law enforcement notify the public about certain convicted sex offenders in their communities, and publicly accessible Web sites for the purpose provided very efficient and searchable formats. 9. In 1996, Rentboy.com went online and revolutionized the convenience and appeal, for renter and rented both, of sex for pay (headline: “Pimp yourself now!”) for locations throughout the world—much to the distress, however, of certain individuals who found that its promises of confidentiality were unreliable. 10. In 1996, Google began as a research project at Stanford University and was launched online in 1998. The search engines Lycos, Yahoo!, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves had been launched between 1994 and 1996. With Google’s generous and well-­financed assistance I located all the information above in about an hour, and given a few more hours, one might say whole afternoons, Google and other engines could help me find innumerable online sites and services for sexual history, sexual politics, sexual theory, sexual health, sexual hookups, sexual gear, sexual devices, sexual performance art, sex for pay, sex for free, and gossip about the sex of friends and strangers alike—the SafeSearch option not on Strict or Moderate, but most assuredly Off. Here I pause, not for want of more examples of emergent, sex-­ changing Internet phenomena in 1996 or any other year in the past two decades, but to allow you to contemplate your own favorite narrative of digital sexual initiation, or lack thereof, on earlier or later occasions, through a series of quickly outmoded gadgets, sites, and software. “Digital Desire” gathers a few choice essays on changes, more or less recent, in the erotics of digital technology: new forms of digital pornography and other sex work, the pleasures and perils of new digital gadgets and apps, transformations and representations of the digital in art, the digitization of earlier technologies such as film and television, BlackBerry and SmartPhone mobility, Internet affect, cybersexual identities, cybersexual

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communities, cybersexual activism, interactive sites for erotic connection from Facebook to Grindr, anxieties about Internet safety and cyberbullying, children on the Net, and challenges to earlier conceptions of archiving, copyright, vice laws, privacy, shame, consent, connectivity, reputation—in other words, radical changes to the way we live now, if we happen to live online in some form or other. As is the case in many such inquiries, the work of Michel Foucault remains of abiding interest, even indispensable prescience, despite his never having lived to experience the World Wide Web. Instead of merely citing him, what if we update him for a digital era not his own and borrow from his habit of numbering, nominalizing, and italicizing ideological forces as if that made them more ominously important, more precisely accounted for, and more legible? By way of an introduction that is most likely not one, I offer here a brief updating of this canonical text of sexual theory, known originally by that Nietzschean name La volonté de savoir, volume 1 of Histoire de la sexualité, and translated into Eng­lish misleadingly, though more invitingly, as The History of Sexuality, volume 1, An Introduction.1 Neither title seems to fit the book well. Foucault has inspired academic discourses (queer theory, feminist theory, gender studies, sexuality studies) that, like his own, are most certainly less an ars erotica and more scientia sexualis, which is to say, rather than making us apprentices in an art of pleasure, which digital technology and culture certainly encourage, it partakes of the modern professional imperative to pin sex down, talk it over, and make it admit to some elusive but essential truthiness about itself, which digital technology and culture also encourage. Is Foucault’s truthiness my truthiness, given that I, too, like the World Wide Web, came of age after his death? I am making the most here of an occasion to write a brief history of digital desire, just volume 1, an introduction to an update of Foucault’s theorization of sex in an idiom somewhat like his own, now that many of his ideological concerns strike me and my students as, at first, merely quaint. Needless to say, the “lines of penetration” for sexual ideology have multiplied with the increasing bandwidth of Internet communication and documentation. “Perverse implantation” and the “deployment” of sexuality hardly seem now as insidious to me as they did when I first read Foucault’s volume, since I know them when I see them and sometimes seize the occasion to embrace them even when they fail to embrace me. For every perversion a previous generation could medicalize or criminalize, there is now a welcoming Web site. Who would not want to be so penetrated, implanted, and deployed? In Foucault’s formulation, however, plea-

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sure was the point of power: the more pleasure, the more power, and the more power, the more pleasure, in an ever-­escalating spiral that one may take for granted now as a state-­sanctioned, corporate-­sanctioned imperative to enjoyment that may or may not be in one’s best interest. We might reconsider his “four privileged objects of knowledge,” those sexually suspect inventions which proved that sex was most certainly not repressed so much as it was deployed, announced, studied, categorized, and confessed, endlessly talked into being, and even, by a “reverse” discourse, given its own political voice. This part is the hardest to teach. Foucault has foremost in mind the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. My students often feel as if he were merely making a joke about the sexual mores of an earlier age, an age even earlier than his own personal antiquity. He does give the impression that he can speak of a history of sexuality only insofar as it no longer exercises much of a claim over him, but his privileged objects of knowledge, helpfully numbered and italicized, innocent of footnotes, are easily renovated for current use in the context of digital culture: 1. “A hysterization of women’s bodies,” in which he includes not only hysteria as a nervous disorder but also motherhood as a saturation of the woman’s body with the sexual significance of her procreative role. Now there is a hysterization of just about everybody—women, men, children— and it accelerates with the invention of new drugs by which medical professionals can invent treatable disorders with new and more clinical names, new drugs that sound like distant planets: Xanax, Zoloft, Ritalin, Viagra. This hysterization accelerates also with the flood of digital imaging that more efficiently eroticizes, commodifies, and advertises all those bodies and their attendant gender norms. Global feminism is still deeply concerned with both the remnant and current instances of this hysterization: this ongoing narrative of women in particular on sedatives, hormones, fertility drugs, birth control drugs, and antidepressants; women as victims of the marriage market, homophobia, rape, incest, slavery, and now misogynistic cyberassault; and women who are otherwise physically, medically, economically, and culturally oversaturated with erotic significance—this ongoing narrative that has been more encouraged than challenged by the efficiency of digital communication and financial exchange. When I first Googled images of “digital desire,” I racked up seventy-­five pages of scantily clad women in erotic poses, followed by a man in Mongolia who used his new digital camera to snap a picture of the word desire scratched into a car window, followed by many more pages of scantily clad women in erotic

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poses, most of them connected with a pornographic operation that understandably chose the same title that I did but had much more focused sexual interests. The example illustrates not only the repetitiveness and banality of young women’s sexual exposure and men’s sexual imagination on the Internet but the serendipitous variations to this norm that lead us along very different threads. A Google image search for the word feminist will get you somewhere else entirely. There are now hits for this text under feminist and digital desire, but unfortunately, as far as I can ascertain, the guy in Mongolia with his new camera has since vanished into the cybernetic ether. 2. “A pedagogization of children’s sex” got even more intense after Foucault died. The popular and medical preoccupation with the dangers of child masturbation would no longer merit the professional attention of a doctor, one hopes; rather, a child or adolescent who neglected to masturbate might arouse medical concern. Foucault did write on more recent instances, such as the child pornography panics of the late-­1970s and Anita Bryant’s child-­obsessed campaign against gay rights. He also dilated on the paradox of children’s consent being categorically disqualified, such that they had to be protected from all desire, including their own. Foucault witnessed only the early stages of the more recent salacious media frenzy over child sexual abuse in day-­care centers, schools, families, neighborhoods, churches, and Michael Jackson’s own personal amusement park. Foucault has already explained to us why most attempts at censorship are now organized around an anxiety about child safety, even when it is the children themselves who are producing the offending text with impressive technological skill. 3. “A socialization of procreative behavior”: yes, of course, when and where has this not been a phenomenon? One need not know who Thomas Malthus was to experience this state-­mandated valorization of the parenting couple and its responsibility to the future of the nation. There are the hundreds of special rights for most married couples and for certain kinds of families, the state regulation of adoption and abortion, and the continuing state assault on or enforcement of different forms of birth control. What makes less sense now is Foucault’s focus on the couple. The industrializing teleology from relatively agrarian structures of kinship to the nuclear family (with its marginalized perverts) to rights-­based individualism brings Foucault’s formulation a step farther even than his critique of the socialization of the procreative couple over the pathologized pervert. The state-­ mandated, corporate-­mandated progression to individualism, whether procreative or not, is in close competition with familial ideology. The target is

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the individual consumer, whose pleasures are implanted and excited, yes, and increasingly well located, verified, and quantified through mass state and corporate data surveillance and biometrics with unprecedented digital access to personal information such as purchasing habits, sexual interests, travel destinations, medical and legal records, physical appearance, digital communications, and home and Internet addresses. The Internet is a powerful source of resistance to familial tradition and a powerful initiation into consumerism on a broader and more individually defined level than was previously possible. Anything like the Defense of Marriage Act (1996) is a lost cause in a nation online: marriage, even gay marriage, has less force to bind or to monopolize the erotic and affective lives of individuals. In the United States, the percentage of married couples has declined, while the numbers of wives in the workplace, unmarried women having children, and adults who live alone have increased. A consumer’s options are multiplied by an ever-­greater ease of global socialization, relocation, and connectivity that renders relationships with family and friends increasingly virtual and dispensable. What matters most is the individual, its access to digital connection and skills, its purchasing power, its evermore personalized hardware that responds to its individualized touch, its various but quantifiable and temporarily satisfiable desires, and its assertion of pleasures and preferences of its own to be explored, indulged, withheld, and otherwise negotiated in more or less contractual and depersonalized interactions with other individuals. MySpace, iPhone, Facebook, what William J. Mitchell dubbed that ever-­extending “Me++,”2 this persistent digital reaching out from a password-­protected me and mine, this digitally mediated and impersonal intimacy, this lonesome accessibility all demands a clickable thumbnail individuality on an electronic network of one’s own. To Foucault’s conception of a socialization of the couple, we might add a competing, depersonalized socialization of the individual that Marx was well aware of, that consumerism valorizes, and that the Internet encourages more powerfully and more sexually than any other phenomenon. 4. Where does this leave “a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure”? As a way of corralling everyone into a procreative marriage and pillorying those who refused, it made sense. Economically, it did not. In Foucault’s lifetime, capital more than its critique fueled the movements for feminism and sexual liberation. A few remnant perversions survive now as paraphilias in the revised fourth edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychological Association and will most likely increase in number in the fifth edition scheduled for 2013, but they are included pri-

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marily because they raise pressing questions of consent: the sadist, the frotteur, the zoophile, and above all the pedophile still retain their psychiatric notoriety. What the privileged have now might better be described as the psychiatrization of disabled pleasures: a corrective technology not to pathologize harmless pleasures but to pathologize our failure to enjoy as many of them as possible, whether in procreative relationships or not. This does make economic sense. In a New Yorker cartoon from 2004, a psychiatrist says to his patient: “These feelings of yours aren’t unusual—in fact, several of them have Web sites.” The Internet and psychiatry are working in each other’s service to implant, deploy, and maintain an ever-­widening variety of pleasures and to pathologize, profile, and treat their hindrance. Generally speaking, we are grateful to them for it: we do not wish to be the absexual, the depressive, the addict, the erectile dysfunctional, or the gender identity disordered. These designations are not asking why one is not the marrying kind. Not the pleasure but the ability and willingness to sustain it are in question. The new class of addicts, among others who are enjoyment challenged, includes those who make what is deemed an inappropriate use of digital technology. In popular journalism if not in the DSM, we have the texting addict, the gaming addict, the chatroom addict, the online gambling addict, the online pornography addict, and of course the CrackBerry addict. The young are especially prone to such addictions: they allegedly acquire a new digital skill at the expense of a robust attention span for more traditional and meaningful academic pursuits, such as Latin or calculus. In academic and popular media accessible online, psychologists and journalists announce that the hard wiring, the brain development, indeed the very DNA of these distracted children will be different from that of previous generations, and this change is rarely if ever considered evolutionary progress. Pleasure and mental health are increasingly a matter of how deftly we manage our drugs and our gadgets. One of the great impasses of queer theory, even what could have been called queer theory in Foucault’s time, is its frequently noted difficulty in committing itself to a particular agenda or paradigm of sexual politics, but this may also be one of its great accomplishments. Queer theory, even the Marxist or psychoanalytic variety that appears to oppose something called queer theory, is exemplary of capitalism and largely to be found within its liberating confines. Queer counterpublics? Queer death drive? Queer jouissance? There’s even a Web site for it. As Foucault observed, power generates the resistance to itself, a paradox that renders resistance a strangely immanent force of ideology, more its partner than its enemy. We find this

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paradox even in the most canonical of queer theory texts before and after Foucault. For example, in John D’Emilio’s canonical essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” this “gay identity” is an invention of capitalism;3 at the same time, he would like to argue that “gay identity” also poses a challenge to capitalism, an inherent resistance, in that it is predicated on a heterosexualized family life that is essentially homophobic. However, we could also make the opposite argument with equal force: capitalism serves the queer revolutionaries that are ostensibly inimical to it, since its essential logic serves to disrupt family life and multiply sexual pleasures. Homophobia is an ideological death rattle. We are caught now between two figures of denial, the capitalist family and the capitalist queer, the former denying it is dying and the latter denying it has already been born. Capitalism is queer that way. We might then revise, or perhaps merely add to, Foucault’s privileged objects of knowledge by identifying specifically digital ones, a history of sexuality that is not comfortably behind us but rapidly unfolding in the present: 1. An institutionalization of personal privacy as a human right that no one seems to enjoy. As hundreds of recent and well-­informed books and articles remind us, privacy is imperiled, declining, or dead. I suspect rather that, by discussing privacy to death, we have brought it more vigorously to life than ever before. Privacy, that utterly confused category, that monster of modernity and urbanity, is always in danger of being invaded—the verb of choice—by digital consumer-­tracking, surveillance cameras, personal cameras going public, hackers, Google stalkers, WikiLeaks, indiscretions on Facebook, and so on. Even as we carelessly, even happily, upload personal information and images online, we are reminded to panic about this “invasion of privacy.” In an intriguing grammatical ambiguity, our privacy is invaded, yes, but privacy itself is invading us too. In olden days before the Internet, I understand, our personal information, even our secrets, normally enjoyed a limited audience for a limited time, such that privacy could be at once improbable and yet taken for granted. Now we have too much privacy and press for more. Privacy stalks us online and off- as a continual cause for legal intervention and journalistic panic. The privacy of private property is alive and well, as we know, but with a few changes in tort law and such, we are assured, even personal privacy might still flourish. In the anthology The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation, various contributors compellingly argue that the repeal or reform of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would at least make Internet sites more

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answerable for the abusive revelations posted by their anonymous users.4 In other words, you should be able to sue for damages and respect for what is properly your own and should not be available for others. Such arguments about personal privacy or reputation sound to me more like defenses of private property than manifestos for the delight of being unobserved and undisturbed. The personal privacy that we lack does indeed function like corporate “privatization,” the sort of privacy that we have in abundance and that seized on the Web with its commercialization on a grand scale in the mid-­1990s. Should not personal privacy, too, be institutionalized through legislation so that it may be bought, sold, and secured, even on the Internet, whether by locked portals, locked files, or protected passwords? More precise is Helen Nissenbaum’s claim in Privacy in Context that we seek not so much privacy, as integrity of context.5 We do not need more secrets or more privacy; we need more different places dedicated to more different activities in which certain information, even certain secrets about us, may be known but not at issue. Either way, personal privacy will still be a dream of ethical consensus enforced by the threat or exercise of righteous aggression, if only it were powerful enough. Will the Internet revolutionize our understanding of privacy, private commerce, confidentiality, shame, and reputation—or merely hystericize it more than ever and require a more clinical institutionalization? I find privacy exceedingly difficult even to define, never mind to police. Everything is in some way both private and public at the same time, such that privacy and publicity are always already invading each other. Even the privacy of individual consciousness bears the traces of intrusion by other people. Privacy is merely a polite name we give to our dread of other people’s aggression. We comfortably dispense with privacy when people are reliably nice, but they are too often not. Personal privacy will flourish only when it finally merges with private property under the watchful eye of the law and its enforcement. No one should use your information and your image without permission and payment. True personal privacy is the trademarking of the self. 2. A prostheticization of affect, the feeling that we should be available for communication with all our friends, met or unmet, at all times, and we should announce, perhaps with varying degrees of honesty, our current activities and, more important, our current feelings about them. Affect is atwitter on a vast scale and rarely for a definable audience. We need not be bothered to feel, but merely present an avatar or emoticon of feeling, to do the work of connectivity and emotional agency. In return, we expect to know the current feelings, felt or unfelt, of other people with a similar degree of

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technified immediacy. We may indeed feel in touch with an increasingly dispersed, diasporic set of acquaintances, friends, and family—let us just call them all “friends” in the Facebook sense of the term. We may feel a welcome retreat from sociality, a sexual distance and defense, as if our online avatars could do the work of sociality for us, more or less adequately. Then looms the threat of disconnection: it is a cruel punishment to have our phones, along with Internet and e-mail access, taken away. We vanish; we confront solitude in its specifically digital existential anxiety. With or without our digital prostheses, we are socially and emotionally alienated and disabled again. 3. A deprofessionalization of information, which is not necessarily to say a deprofessionalization of knowledge, which is an instrumental organization of information. Information has been democratized online, often with little respect for professional protocols of confidentiality, credibility, copyright, and distribution. It is the force that is rendering libraries of the nondigital variety increasingly redundant. One goes online for medical information to question a doctor’s opinion, a professor’s data, a priest’s dire predictions—or to do without them. This trend includes the deprofessionalization of sexual knowledge, especially for children and other sexual minorities, that has accompanied the decline, if not the fall, of the medicalization or criminalization of their erotic behavior. The access to sexual information is unprecedented and subverts the power of professional authorities to define the limits of the sexually acceptable. For sexually marginalized or pathologized people, this unprecedented access to diverse forms of information is most welcome. 4. A fetishization of consent. We live in the Age of Consent, or wish we did. Consent, including the “decency” by which we acknowledge the consent of onlookers, is one of the few official restrictions or demands on sexual behavior, even though consent can never be counted on to make sex pleasurable or meaningful. This liberal rhetoric of consent, like a fetish, is all seduction and no content. It is neither an ars erotica nor a scientia sexualis, nor does it represent eroticism as a communal ritual, a form of social belonging, a structure of social meaning, or an expression of love; rather, the focus of consent law narrows sexual morality down to a contractual liberty of the individual on a par with the defense of private property. Above all, throughout every sexual interaction, we are to be individuals in full possession of our independent judgment, preferences, and laptops. We agree to agree about everything we do, as well as how, when, where, and with whom we do it. As we all know, however, consent can be a mirage. Who

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can give consent, how could we be sure, should we get it in writing, need we always care? In “Thinking Sex,” a justly canonical formulation of sexual ethics around the concept of consent in civil-­rights law, Gayle Rubin diagrams and deconstructs a series of oppositions, the “inner circle” and the “outer circle” by which certain cultures valorize good sex, while pathologizing, criminalizing, and otherwise marginalizing bad sex.6 Among these oppositions are sex that is marital or in sin, free or for money, vanilla or S-­M, at home or in the park. Why do we know from childhood on that we should we not make ourselves at home in the park? Would you, could you, in the park? Would you, could you, in the dark? The one opposition that is pointedly inadmissible to these circles, the one that remains sacred in Rubin’s analysis, is “consensual or non-­consensual,” even though sexual pleasure on the part of the unconsenting has enjoyed a long and obvious history. The Internet intensifies the epistemological challenges to the rhetoric of consent: how do we always or even sometimes know whether our erotic interactions online are truly consensual, if we are addressing sane adults, if they are who they say they are and do what they say they do, if the content of a site is what it says it is, if our money is going where we are told, if we will be exposed online embarrassingly or unwittingly to our friends or enemies, if all will remain respectfully confidential and contained within its moment, and if a performer is live or a recording, under duress or free, legally protected or legally exploited? Pornography and prostitution have always been affiliated with these nagging worries, but the stakes are higher, the contexts are more obscure, the mobility of the market is global, and the possibilities for fraud and the trafficking in human beings are more numerous and profitable. How does one avoid being sexually stalked, exposed, bullied, blackmailed, or humiliated, when so many people have so many digital tools and databanks on hand to cyberassault us anonymously, brutally, globally, unpunishably, and permanently? There is also the question of vastly different conceptions of sexuality and consent across increasingly porous national and cultural borders, which is also to say it is not the Age of Consent for everyone everywhere. 5. A commercialization of sexual variation. Even more now than Foucault could have predicted, our pleasures are implanted, deployed, and excited within a capitalist economy of enjoyment and power. Whatever your pleasure, there is most likely a Web site for it, an invitation to the voyage that may have premium members with special privileges at higher prices and advertising space individually and automatically tailored to your most esoteric desires. Sexual activism will help you assert your pleasure more

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profitably. “Reverse” discourse was never the best term for it, nor was reification. Through activism we seek what Axel Honneth, in Hegelian mode, calls the empathic recognition that precedes all social cognition and intercommunication: at once an expansion and a condensation of the market of desires evermore queerly, creatively, exhaustively, narrowly, locally, verifiably, and legally defined as human.7 Queer is the new normal. It thrives with capitalism online. What is queerest in queer theory sounds like capitalism: no reliable future, no indispensable past, everyone connected rhizomorphically online, everyone an individualist in a serially repetitive search for pleasure and depersonalized intimacy in the moment. This insight was not lost on Foucault and his generation. One of his frequent interlocutors, Guy Hocquenghem, wrote in 1973 that the queer “cruising machine” displays strong analogies with capitalist accumulation under “the guise of perpetual drift and sway” in which “the conqueror thinks of his next conquest immediately upon completing the first.”8 Queerness is allegedly the gift one has for a pleasure, even a devastating pleasure, beyond any symbolic economy that could articulate it as an ideal or norm, and yet articulate it we do, even in books published by university presses: the queer erotics of cruising, transience, fragmentation, ambiguity, impersonality, anonymity, experimentation, individualism, diversity, multiculturalism, freedom—in short, the sexual ideal of capital. This is not to say that the queer are to be forgiven for serving as allegorical figures of the success of capitalism, rather than its decline—nostalgia beckons, as we know. 6. A rhizomorphic dispersal of erotic connectivity. Online, one can experience countless possible permutations of friendings, ratings, hits, chats, pokes, thumbs-­up, glances, flirtations, cruisings, hookups, and invitations from places one has never otherwise been and from people one would never otherwise meet, but one might find oneself paradoxically anchored to a keyboard or webcam, in solitude, in a room somewhere, for hours on end. The unpredictability of this movable feast, to what locations it might drift, mimics and transcends the concurrent global movement toward urbanization. Exploration online is like moving to the city, and then to another city and another, even if your body is in the middle of nowhere. One moves through this city of cities for the same old reasons: to make more money, to meet exciting people surprisingly different from oneself, and best of all to meet exciting people surprisingly like oneself. The sexual opportunities may be thrilling or sustaining or demoralizing, but they will also seem boundless and defy our powers of representation. 7. A gothicization of children’s sex. This is just an increasingly paranoid

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version of the pedagogization of children’s sex that Foucault described. The appeal for the professional, juridical, and technological micromanagement of children escalated with digital technology, as did the nagging fear that none of it was working. The child online gives us pause. By way of cinematic horror and tabloid scandal, we have maintained an increasingly violent and creepy account of this child who knows too much and who resides seductively alongside our wishful certainty about children’s innocence, their sexual vulnerability to trauma or adult manipulation, and their need of constant protection. To borrow a phrase from James Kincaid, the child is a figure of “erotic innocence.”9 For every article about children’s traumatic exposure to pornography or predators on the Internet, there is an article on children’s uncanny, erotic, even vindictive exploitation of digital communication. Sometimes the Internet is childlike. The child and the Internet represent our ambiguous future: they may seem at once harmless and dangerous, vulnerable and scary, supervised and unmanageable, innocent and amoral, ignorant and much too well informed. 8. A despatialization of sexual community. If there was ever a bar for it, there is now a Web site for it. In his theorization of queer counterpublics, Michael Warner emphasizes the necessity of queer commercial spaces for queer community and also describes a nostalgia for queer community organized around iconic locations of queer socialization: the neighborhood bar, bathhouse, or bookstore.10 Online, however, geographical community gives way to digital connectivity with no necessary dependence on the propinquity of queer neighborhoods. Even when there is still a bar, bathhouse, or bookstore for it, digital applications have already penetrated it: digital advertising, digital music and images, digital systems for surveillance and money management, and wireless digital access for your personal digital gadget that will connect you with old friends who are somewhere else and new friends who have profiles with various personal measurements and are standing a specified number of feet behind you (the leading cause of another new digital pathology, Grindr whiplash). 9. An aestheticization of gender and sexuality. What purpose do they need to serve anymore? If your sexual interests, your gender interests, and your anatomy no longer determine your destiny or your social role (that is a big if ), we are left with gender for its own sake, sex for its own sake, recalling the mantra of aestheticism, art for art’s sake: not necessarily for the sake of profit, religion, politics, procreation, or morality, but rather for the intensity of the pleasures of its own form as it strikes our fancy, less a politics than a cosmetics, whether topical or surgical. Queer performativity has

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been its most elegant theorization and transgendered transformation its emblematic instantiation. From Donna Haraway’s cyborg women to Sandy Stone’s posttranssexual manifestos to Eve Shapiro’s gender circuits, digital technology is both the playground and the battleground for radical and not-­ so-­radical erotic and gendered performances, communities, interventions, experimentations, and transitions. Everyone online finds this out sooner or later. 10. A deregulation of sexual commerce. This may seem counterintuitive at first, given the escalation of legislation on pornography, prostitution, and privacy; nevertheless, a law is only as good as its enforcement, and vice laws are only minimally enforceable when the Internet can transcend national and cultural boundaries to allow the much freer flow of capital, communication, and images. This deregulation amid escalating regulation may be attractive to the relatively harmless, stigmatized seekers and sellers of sexual images, sexual companionship, or sexual community, but it is also attractive to that more vicious population who uses the Internet for sexually exploiting vulnerable men and, far more commonly, vulnerable women and children. If, for example, making your prostitution plans is as easy online as making your vacation plans, indeed if the two are indistinguishable, could there ever be enough cops and courts in the world to police so vast and nimble a market? 11. A global hybridization of sexual discourse, or its digital creolization, to borrow Jillana B. Enteen’s preferred term in Virtual Eng­lish.11 She acknowledges that there are digital divides and unequal exchanges of power among classes and cultures on the Web, but she also reveals in Foucauldian fashion how simplistic the distinction has become between the digital haves and the digital have-­nots, as if power functioned in only one direction, from the top down. She describes the cultural mashing and misprision of Eng­lish and local languages in Southeast Asia, the mixing of foreign and local traditions, the effort of some sexual networking sites to incorporate cultural diversity, and hybridized networking sites that are concerned less with sexual tourism than with local sexual community, activism, and education. The anthropology of the digital is less about cultural integrity than about cultural collisions, collaborations, and compromises. 12. An oedipalization of the Cloud. As it has in recent years been developing and debated, “cloud computing” is strictly speaking a private utility for off-­site data storage and management that interfaces with a client that pays for access to its own information; however, it is also an inviting metaphor for thinking more generally about digital desire. The Cloud is a term

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rich in connotations of deified paternal authority that begs for a capital letter and a masculine pronoun. Technological utopianism has always had its sci-­fi, paranoid shadow, usually based on the fear that our machines are devious and might betray us. The metaphor of the Net or the Web is a perfect occasion for such fantasies. They both have that reassuring promise of a vast and complicated structure of interconnection—and also its scary shadow. As a metaphor for social connection, the Web evokes an elegant pattern, a silken fabric, a tenuous thread that attaches but may be brushed away. Similarly, the Net evokes a safety net should we stumble, a sporting net should we score, a net of transparent walls should we feel a bit crowded, and a fishnet stocking should we like that sort of thing. At the same time, both terms have an insidious, arachnoid connotation of fatal entrapment: nets for catching prey, webs for a spider to spin around flies, creepy cobwebs, tangled webs of deceit, as we digital Ariadnes attempt to follow the threads on our screen unscathed, in and out of the labyrinth. The Cloud as a metaphor, especially that more comprehensive and monotheistic thunderhead, the Intercloud, seems the very sublimation of the Web and the Net—though it, too, casts a shadow over the digital landscape. As the Internet is the network of networks, so the Intercloud is the Cloud of Clouds and resides in Heaven, like the king of kings and the mystery of mysteries—in Heaven, or somewhere similarly vague, sublime, and cold. Do you know where all your hardware is? If so, you have not yet ascended to the Cloud. Your beautiful room should be emptied of all that hot, sweaty machinery, and your data should be condensed and cooled off somewhere icy and distant, maybe Finland, maybe Siberia, saving power, saving you money, saving you space. The Cloud, like an angelic judge, has all your information and much more besides. You feel lighter because you feel your accounts, your history, your resources are uncannily elsewhere, in a place amorphous, ethereal, or wandering, but potentially stormy, confusing, or unreachable. Net and Web are more like id or ego, but the Cloud is pure superego. As such, the Cloud is supremely off-site and difficult to grasp. His interface is a demanding office where we possess little but guilt or praise and where all is virtual but this body and this room. He knows too much about us and might judge without mercy. He knows even more than we do and passes all understanding. The digital revolution is already under way. Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming of age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse of digital desire. Some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reinvigorated herein. Online, sex will be good again.

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Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6

7

8 9

10

11

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1976; New York: Pantheon, 1978); later reissued as The Will to Power (London: Penguin, 1998). For an astute critique of the Hurley translation, see Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). William J. Mitchell, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 100–113. Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford Law Books, 2009). Gayle S. Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carole Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 267–319. For a critical celebration of this essay and its influence, including commentary about its context by Rubin herself, see “Rethinking Sex,” special issue GLQ , 17:1 (2011). Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom, trans. Ladislaus Löb (2001; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Guy Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses, trans. Noura Wedell (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010), 72–73; originally published anonymously in French in 1973. James Kincaid, Child-­Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999); and Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2002). Jillana B. Enteen, Virtual Eng­lish: Queer Internets and Digital Creolization (New York: Routledge, 2009).

Steven Bruhm Cell Phones from Hell

Jill

Johnson wasn’t always a naughty girl. When we first met her in 1979 as the heroine of When a Stranger Calls (dir. Fred Walton), she was a responsible teenager with good babysitting references, a quick wit, and enough maternal instinct to guarantee that she be rewarded with a loving husband and healthy children at the movie’s end. By 2006, though, things have changed. In the film’s remake (dir. Simon West), Jill is a cell phone addict in the midst of a pedestrian romantic crisis. Having broken up with her boyfriend Bobby, Jill needs to talk to him and to her girlfriends ad infinitum about how the relationship is over. In so doing she exceeds her cell phone time allotment by some 800 minutes. Her father sentences her to one month without mobile phone or car, and she is forced to babysit to pay down her debts to Pa Johnson and Ma Bell. By removing the cell phone, her primary instrument for communicating with her object of desire, Daddy will teach her a lesson in responsibility and focus—in making “sacrifices . . . even when it’s hard.” By 2006, the Name of the Father has gone digital and, with it, America’s Oedipal landscape has changed, both in crimes and in punishments. Cellular technology has put Jill in the middle of the woods to be the prey of a murThe South Atlantic Quarterly 110:3, Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-1275752 © 2011 Duke University Press

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derer, and cellular technology is the means of her torture: the stranger himself repeatedly calls Jill from a cell phone, evidenced by the fact that he can talk to her from anywhere inside or outside the house. If the 1970s telephonic stranger was terrifying because he had invaded the domestic space to become that ominous shadow at the top of the stairs, the twenty-­ first-­century murderer is terrifying precisely because he is not fixed. He is free to roam with his digital phallus firmly clutched in his sweaty palm. Jill Johnson is not the only young woman to be harassed by cell phones in the first decade of the new millennium. She is joined by the sorority girls of Black X-­mas,1 also released in 2006 (dir. Glen Morgan), also a remake of a 1970s telephone terror movie. They, too, receive threatening calls from a murderer lurking upstairs in the girls’ suburban house—a murderer who, like Jill Johnson’s stranger, is also no longer fixed to a landline as he was in the original Black Christmas (dir. Bob Clark, 1974); like the 2006 stranger, he uses his victims’ cells to beleaguer the survivors until he picks them off one by one. Then there is the One Missed Call series (dir. Takashi Miike, 2003), which originated in Japan and has replicated itself in an American remake (dir. Eric Valette, 2008). This group of films depicts the horrors of cell phone use but with the bonus of eliminating the lethal middleman. In these films the cell phones do the actual killing. Your phone rings, you answer, and it plays you the sound of your own death throes, sounds you will then make for real at the appointed future time of the call. And don’t think that not owning a cell phone can keep you off the hit list: Stephen King’s 2006 novel Cell tells the story of America laid waste by a mysterious pulse that has spread through cell phone networks, frying the brains of those who use them, who then kill those who may not.2 Fusing the fear that cell phones cause brain cancer with that of “smart mobs” and telephonically organized terrorism post-­9/11, King places cell phones at ground zero of a contemporary American Armageddon in which mobile users go mad and ravage the entire nation. Babysitters and sorority girls are prime victims (because prime users), but they are also synecdoches for a global practice of networking. Safety in Numbers These cell phones from hell, obviously, are the twenty-­first century up-­to-­ date with a vengeance. As communications analysts remind us, “A turning point in the history of telecommunications was marked in 2002 in that the number of mobile subscribers overtook the number of fixed-­line sub-

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scribers on a global scale: mobiles thus became the dominant technology for voice communications.”3 According to the New York Times, in 2000 there were an estimated 77 million cell phones in the United States alone, “with more than 37,500 people signing up for wireless phone service each day.”4 And most of these users are young adults: “At the end of 2001, 80 percent of those aged 15 to 24 used [mobile phones] regularly in EU countries,” and “a third of the Finnish population aged 7 to 10 had their own cellphone.”5 Elsewhere, “the proportion of Japanese girls owning mobile phones under the age of 18 has reached almost 100%.”6 Part prosthetic device, part fashion statement, the cell phone has come to occupy the paradoxical status of a cultural fetish that guarantees one’s individuality and prestige. The most popular girl in school is no longer the prom queen with the largest bosom and most beautiful pre-­engagement ring but the American Idol wannabe with the biggest address book and the most attractive ringtones. Given the harassment that Jill Johnson and her cohorts endure, it’s no small irony that sociologists should agree on the single most important reason for young people to own cell phones and for parents to prescribe them: safety. In a study conducted in Spain, “no less than 59 percent of new users were of the opinion that they were safer than when they had access only to a land-­line. This ‘passion for security’ is also reflected in the study . . . carried out with a US population that had just acquired its first cellphone. When the phone had not been bought especially for organizing a specific situation or event, the commonest reason for buying it was precisely safety and security.”7 In this context, safety and security extend beyond the personal and into the geographical and global. As José García-­Montes and his colleagues put it, There thus emerges a new frontier that is no longer political, but technological: that of areas without coverage. However far-­flung or out-­of-­the-­way a village may be, it belongs to the “safe world” if it has coverage. With mobile phone capability we are connected, and, in the worst of cases, we can always call an emergency service. On the other hand, beyond the limits of coverage begin isolation and danger. Indeed, for those accustomed to living with the mobile phone, traveling without it may truly be a risk.8

This cellular mapping presents a logic by which connectivity equals safety in that cell phones create a phantasm of protection, a visual and audial sense that the person to whom one is connected can respond effectively and immediately to any crisis one might be in. This phantasm of connectivity authorizes the 2006 Jill not only to phone the police when the creepy

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calls begin—she does this in 1979 as well—but also to phone her father; her girlfriend Scarlett; the solicitous mother Mrs. Mandrakis, who has left her no fewer than two cell phone numbers where she can be reached in case of emergency; and the Mandrakises’ son, Todd, who may be staying at the nearby guesthouse. Telephones have got Jill into this mess and phones are the continued modus operandi of terror, but they are also the connection to safety and to the parent figures who might come running. Or almost. Mr. Johnson is not at home, Scarlett is out of range, the police are a good twenty minutes away, Mrs. M. has turned off her cell, and Todd is off at college. When the chips are down, so are the phones. In the telephone terror movies of the 1970s, calling for help brought the cops on the run to protect (albeit poorly) our distressed damsels. In the films of recent years, however, 911 will probably tell you that while your call is important, your service provider is experiencing a heavier than normal volume right now and your call has been placed in sequence until an operator can attend to you. Eventually you’ll learn that geographical distance or weather conditions make it impossible for the police to reach you for hours, but don’t worry, you have your cell and are welcome to phone back with updates to your situation. So much for safety, cellular or otherwise. No matter whether the other person answers the phone, cellular technology is remarkable for the way it proliferates the metaphoric sites of desire, and particularly the desire of the other, that Avital Ronell suggests have been contained in the telephone since its invention. As she points out, the telephone evolved through Alexander Graham Bell’s overdetermined desire to reconnect to his deaf mother and deaf wife and to revivify his dead brother;9 in other words, the telephone was the fulfillment of Bell’s wish to communicate with the otherwise incommunicable, to create across the lines and through technology the phantasm of himself and the other as thoroughly connected subjects, and ultimately to heal a fractured familial network through the healing connections of a prosthetic machine.10 Thus for Ronell, the telephone’s inaugural line of communication—“Watson, come here! I want you!”—is a statement of desire: By all evidence, “I want you” suggests that desire is on the line. . . . It emerges from what is not present-­at-­hand; thus, “I want you” phantomizes you. I want that which I do not possess, I do not have you, I lack you, I miss you: Come here, Watson, I want you. . . . Where the call as such suggests a commanding force, the caller, masked by the power apparatus, may in fact be weak, suffering, panicked, putting through a call for help.11

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Whether this is Bell calling the mother, Freud calling the Mother (“Freud situates the telephone . . . as the perfectibility of the womb [one of ‘man’s’ preferred organs]”),12 or Jill Johnson calling her parents, the telephone creates a phantom of the person who is not there and then bridges the gap signified by this phantasm. Which makes it not a long distance from “Watson, . . . I want you” to the stranger’s horrific utterance to Jill in both versions of When a Stranger Calls. Asking the Freudian question “What do you want?” the Jills receive the reply, “I want your blood—all over me.” Like Bell, the stranger is entirely devoted to human contact; like Bell, he wants to reach out and touch someone. At least in the 1979 version, the stranger desires a full communication where he can be understood by others, by all others, through simple human companionship, sexual conquest, or murder—all physically embodied acts. Cast in telephonic terms, he wants connection in a world that is constantly forcing him to disconnect. But this reaching out and touching, this wanting connectivity, is very different in the world of today’s telephone horror movies than it was in its 1970s analogues. If the new millennium’s telephone movies imagine proliferated sites of connective desire, new ways of remaining bound to parents, families, and loved ones across vast distances, these films also proliferate the sites of terror. Or more to the point of my argument, they eliminate the idea of “site” altogether. When someone phones you from his or her landline phone, as was necessarily the case in the 1970s, you imagine that person in a clearly demarcated space; you “place” him or her at home, in the office, or wherever you know there to be a phone. This is what rendered 1970s phone films so terrifying: murderers Curt Duncan of When a Stranger Calls and Billy of Black Christmas were both locatable in a certain space—the shadow at the top of the stairs, the attic, the housemother’s bedroom. Both hero and villain were imagined as singular, autonomous beings locatable in space. As long as our heroines were talking on their fixed-­line telephones to murderers on other fixed-­line phones, as long as they were “alone” at their landline talking to someone else alone on his landline, we knew them to be safe from lethal clutches; we knew that the murderer was distantly placed at his phone as well. Cell phones make no such promises, since the murderer can be right behind you, and often is. The cell phone ups the ante by changing the phantasmatic quality of the interlocutor’s existence or imagined presence. Cell telephony always exploits the ability to move, not to be placed, not to be fixed: the ability to be a phantasm but at the same time to be deracinated as phantasm. Moreover, whereas the terrorism of fixed-­line telephones rendered the home of the 1970s an unsafe

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place, contemporary cell phone narratives allow the danger to radiate outward, like waves from a cell tower. In the archive of twenty-­first-­century telephone terror films, cell phones cut the domestic cord: terror spreads to cars, guesthouses, parks, hospitals, into other people’s cell phones and computers, and eventually into other states and countries. Murder has become viral and self-­replicating, claiming as its ultimate victim the speaking—or telephoning—subject. Is This the Party to Whom I Am Speaking? For Jean Baudrillard, this deracination of the phantasm of the other—a deracination produced by technological proliferation—has resulted in what he calls the “transparency of evil.” He argues that the increased connectivity offered by digital technology has merely produced the compulsion to produce and to participate in the absolutely uninhibited exchange of particles between systems and within systems, an exchange that rejects any notion of otherness or the foreign.13 Thus, the “masses . . . no longer speak, they . . . chat” (Transparency, 78). Or they text. Or Facebook. Or tweet. The result, claims Baudrillard, is that we have dissolved the very structure that predicates communication with an “other,” for we have eroded the possibility of signification itself; there is no longer any distance between a sign and the thing it might signify or the self and the other to which it might address itself. As he puts it, “the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of contiguity and networks” (54) now “form[s] an integrated circuit with me. . . . [These digital machines] are so many transparent prostheses, integrated into the body to the point of being almost part of its genetic make-­ up” (58). He concludes: At one time the body was a metaphor for the soul, then [during the sexual revolution of the 1960s] it became a metaphor for sex. Today it is no longer a metaphor for anything at all, merely the locus of metastasis, of the machine-­ like connections between all its processes, of an endless programming devoid of any symbolic organization or overarching purpose: the body is thus given over to the pure promiscuity of its relationship to itself—the same promiscuity that characterizes networks and integrated circuits. (7)

A bracing rejoinder to the sociological theory of safety in cell phones, Baudrillard’s analysis places us in a promiscuous network that is the result of signs with no referent or meaning beyond themselves, signs that do not connect, signs not of subjects who communicate but of users who net-

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work. Like those gothic telephoners in our midst, we are deracinated phantasms all. For those of us wearied by the constant cellular blather around us, Baudrillard’s jeremiad has a certain appeal. Compare the two versions of When a Stranger Calls, for example, and one has a real respect for the 1979 Jill (Carol Kane), when she sits stone-­faced on the stairs listening to the telephone ring and refusing—for the only time in the film—to answer it, because she knows who is on the other end. Contrast this to the up-­to-­ date Jill (Camilla Belle; is this surname a Hollywood joke?), who continually answers the phone, despite knowing what she’ll hear. And in case we miss the point, director Simon West interjects a scene in which Jill’s friend Tiffany wisely suggests that Jill let the phone ring; the Mandrakises’ voice mail can pick up the message. This suggestion Jill refuses because she’s expecting a call from Bobby, the very boyfriend to whom she has talked endlessly in order to “end this thing, once and for all,” the very boyfriend whose connectivity with Jill has put her in the woods in the first place. Ellis Hanson suggests, “If you’re in a movie, don’t answer the phone.”14 I would say that if you’re in a movie, at least a movie about teenagers in the new millennium, and the phone rings, you have no choice. You have to answer it; you simply can’t help yourself. The new gothic monster may in the first instance be the cellular murderer, but the Baudrillardian compulsion to answer that phone call is the murderer’s chief accomplice. While Baudrillard nicely frames for us the gothic heroine’s tragic flaw of going where she should not, his scathing dismissal of digital technology may be missing some crucial connections of its own, for it too quickly voids “promiscuous networks” of any meaningful communication. If we are indeed compelled to participate in “the absolutely uninhibited exchange of particles” that we watch terrorized teenagers experience in cell phone movies, then what might be made of that very compulsion to exchange, to participate? What ends does it serve, and how do those ends figure in a world of digital communications? I propose that we consider the problems of telephone connectivity and its gothic terrors through a place where telephones are not: in Georges Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality. In his introduction, Bataille boldly claims that eroticism’s “dominant element” is in the relationship between continuity and discontinuity—what I have been reading as “connectivity” and “disconnection” in interpersonal relations conducted through the telephone. According to Bataille, “We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find

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the state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last, there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that is.”15 Our primary response to that “obsession with a primal continuity” is, for Bataille, sexual reproduction: by reproducing ourselves sexually, we forge a tangible link between ourselves and our offspring (not to mention our sexual partners), and ourselves and the “future.” Through the child, we live on in a place that we will otherwise not be. Yet, sexual reproduction also implicitly (or explicitly) announces our discontinuousness, because an other, separate partner is necessary for us to mate, and the being produced in that mating will be separate from both parents, a part of them yet totally alienated from them. Thus the inescapable contradiction that Bataille calls “eroticism”: “we yearn for our lost continuity,” but in that yearning we are confronted with the realization that only violence and death can “wrench” us from our state of discontinuity. Continuity as salvation from physical death can be achieved only through a kind of ontological death, just as the discontinuity that guarantees our status as singular beings is that which must be sacrificed in the fantasy of immortality. Like death itself, “Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea” (Erotism, 22). No more a single-­cell organism than the girls who network in telephone terror movies, “What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain” (19). Such a desire to bring continuity to a discontinuous world drives the narrative of When a Stranger Calls in both its 1979 and 2006 incarnations. We have already seen Jill’s compulsive attempts at continuity through telephonic connection, attempts that the film parodies by replication in the murderous speaker’s own desire to connect with her by phone and by blood. We have also already seen Jill’s attempts at discontinuity, her use of the phone to broker a release from the repeated attentions of the stranger and to achieve the kind of isolating safety from him that only a connection to others can bring. But the 1979 version of the film thematizes this problem much more fully than mere sensationalism may suggest. After the first— and most famous—twenty minutes of babysitter terrorizing,16 the film takes us into the personal life of the murderer, Curt Duncan (Tony Beckley), and his desire to connect with other people. The horror of his desired connection to Jill through the dead children and through her blood gives way in the second part of the film to a pathetic, even touching, depiction

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of Curt’s attempt to befriend a woman named Tracy (Colleen Dewhurst). He approaches her in a bar, has his unwanted advances interrupted by a chivalrous local who beats him up, and then he follows Tracy home. She takes pity on him, seeing in him something tender and vulnerable, until he enters her apartment uninvited. (He intrudes as she leaves the apartment door open to go inside and—you guessed it—answer the ringing telephone.) After repeated rejections and after being hunted by a private detective (Charles Durning) who had worked the case of the Mandrakis child murders and who is trying to kill Duncan, he ends up in a dumpster tragically chanting, “No one can see me anymore. Nobody can hear me. No one touches me. I’m not here. I don’t exist. I was never born.” Thus the film situates this telephonic murderer within the conflicting desires to connect to the other and to disconnect from all others, to sublimate the self into sex and the sexual self into death, to be and not to be at the same time. The paradox is perfectly articulated when, near the film’s end, he returns to terrorize Jill one last time. Having knocked her husband unconscious and replaced him in her bed (unbeknownst to her, of course), he utters, “You can’t see me. But I had to come back. Don’t you know why?” This utterance warrants our attention. Its first sentence—“You can’t see me”—connects the lethal Duncan to the one we saw in the film moments earlier, the one fantasizing his own dissolution; it is a continuation of his drive toward nonbeing, toward his own discontinuity with his unbearable world. Yet the rest of the speech is a call to continuity with Jill: “I had to come back” to enter your bed/to kill you, and “Don’t you know why?” invites you into my mental and emotional space to imagine my motives. To engage and to kill, to be continuous and to assure discontinuity: these are the problems that the telephone raised in the first twenty minutes of the film and that complete the film’s lucubrations on telephonic desire and telephonic terror. A discontinuous self needs continuity with the other in order to confirm that self; yet it also needs to chafe against the draw to connect with the other, as that connection would violently, even suicidally, confirm its being in the world. This power—and terror—of Duncan’s role as telephoner/sexual subject turns on his transformation from disembodied telephonic voice to a body unable to complete any of its attempted calls. For Mladen Dolar, the second part of the 1979 Stranger renders Duncan “a trivial, broken and desperate creature the moment he ceases to be the threatening presence surmised on the other end of the line, and we see words coming out of his mouth.”17 In his emphasis on our seeing Duncan speak, Dolar is following on the work of film theorist Michel Chion and his concept of the “acous-

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matic,” a human voice that emanates from a source we cannot see or an origin we cannot identify.18 For Chion, the acousmatic destabilizes the listener’s very sense of where she is in space, for the acousmêtre—the phantasmatic producer of the sound—is both inside her head and out (Audio-­ Vision, 129). Acousmatic sound raises the question not of what the sound is or even “where” it is—it’s everywhere—but rather where it comes from (69). Crucial for Dolar is Chion’s sense that power resides in the penetrating voice, which is homologous to but replaces the panoptic eye: “The power manifests itself vividly in stories of the harassing phone caller whose ‘voice’ sees everything” (130). Duncan loses that power, Dolar argues, because “when the voice gets attached to the body, it loses its omnipotent charismatic character—it turns out to be banal, as in The Wizard of Oz. The aura crumbles, the voice, once located, loses its fascination and power, it has something like castrating effects on its bearer, who could wield or brandish his or her phonic phallus as long as its attachment to a body remained hidden.”19 This “de-­acousmatizing,” this (re)attachment of voice to body, performs the same problem that I have presented in terms of the continuous and discontinuous: for Duncan to seek continuity with another is to vocalize, through the telephone, the demand for intimacy, a demand that the telephone both enables and forecloses. Likewise for film viewers, who see in the suturing of Duncan’s (threatening) voice to his (pathetic) body the continuities of thwarted desire, at the same time they need to disavow any sympathy with that desire. Fixed within his discontinuous body and in the midst of his “incomprehensible adventure” (Erotism, 15), Duncan enacts for us and for himself the irresolvable tension of eroticism. So what happens when we take Duncan out of the land of fixed, rotary phones and bring him into the digital age? According to Dolar, the de-­acousmatizing of Duncan, the embodying of this telephoning subject, produces a banal, castrated, and broken figure worthy of the film critic’s dismissal. While we might question with the cast of the 1979 Stranger whether Duncan ever really “ceases to be a threatening presence,” it is remarkable that the 2006 remake of When a Stranger Calls does not humanize the murderer in any way; it does not inscribe in him any sort of narrative that might make continuous to us his thwarted social and familial relations and his murderous impulses. He has no name, no context, no psychological condition, no history or subjectivity that would explain, mitigate, or even adumbrate his pathology.20 And what is even more striking cinematically is that this unnamed stranger is never de-­acousmatized. He never speaks in a way that the camera records. We hear him through the tele-

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phone, we see him violently act, but we never watch him speak. (Nor could we. While the stranger is played by actor Tommy Flanagan, the stranger’s voice is provided by Lance Henriksen, an actor we do not otherwise see.) As a speaking/sexual/violent subject, this stranger may be as caught up as his predecessor Duncan in negotiating the vagaries of continuity and discontinuity with the other, but this version of the film doesn’t let us know that. Rather, the stranger presents to us that networked, bottomed-­out, deracinated other about which Baudrillard so bitterly complained. The cellular voice in this film remains as unfixed and deracinated as the cellular user, unable to be placed or located within the confined space of the body. In this version of the cellular landscape, it is not simply persons that are displaced—rendered discontinuous—from one another; rather, selves are also displaced from their own vocalized meaning-­productions. If the 2006 stranger is a killing machine incapable of feeling the human tension of continuity and discontinuity, that machine is brilliantly metaphorized in the cellular phone. Remember that the fixed-­line phone, as we saw in 1979, mediated its subjects in ways so that connection and disconnection meant something specific: connection with the murderer meant safety from his clutches (that is, it assured discontinuity), and a disconnected phone or prolonged busy signal would indicate to a caller that something is wrong on the other end. (Jill’s dead phone near the 1979 film’s end brings the private eye to her house, where he then shoots and kills Duncan.) But in 2006, phones do not (dis)connect to subjects because there are no “subjects”—conventionally imagined—to (dis)connect. The stranger is not, like Duncan, seeking connection to others in a way that blood and phones might provide. At the beginning of the film, he calls Alice, but when Stacy answers the phone instead, she is substituted for the stranger’s intended victim. Later in the film the stranger may indeed want Jill’s blood all over him, as he did in 1979, but the Simon West version writes out all the other strategies Duncan used for making interpersonal connection. The later stranger does not murder the sleeping children or bathe himself in their blood, even though he has the chance. The two victims we do get to see—the housemaid Maria and Jill’s friend Tiffany—are left physically intact on their deaths. Indeed, any human connection that either woman may have provided for Jill during her trials is displaced onto their cell phones: we get a long scene in which Jill repeatedly dials Maria’s cell in order to locate her, but all Jill can eventually turn up is Maria’s abandoned phone. This situation repeats itself with Tiffany but ups the ante. Jill eventually finds Tiffany’s dead but otherwise intact body lying next to

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Figure 1. A dead Tiffany by her cell phone. Film still, When a Stranger Calls, dir. Simon West, 2006

its mobile (see figure 1) but not before Jill has received a call from the stranger on Tiffany’s cell. The stranger has murdered Tiffany for her phone, and the “caller ID” function that would name the subject on the other end of the (nonexistent) line is now nothing but a postmodern joke. Nothing but death is on the other end, an absence that deracinates all subjects and dissolves them into a network of continually discontinuous persecutions. Whereas mobile phones have moved us from a position of asking “Who are you?” to “Where are you?” When a Stranger Calls moves us from wondering “Who is there?” and “Where is he?” to “Where is there? ” Eventually, we find that no one is “there” because there is no there there; he is no one and nowhere in particular. The Black Christmas series will do much the same thing, only with a change in tone. In this narrative, a murderous character named Billy inhabits the attic of a university sorority house that used to be his childhood home and where, at least in the 2006 version, he murdered or maimed other members of his family at Christmas. As the sorority girls prepare for the holidays with varying degrees of Yuletide spirit (all relating to the kind of connections they have with their families), the murderer kills them one by one. The remaining residents then receive calls on the house phone downstairs, calls that barrage them with voices both menacing and vulnerable—voices that channel Billy’s parents and his childhood self as well as voices that threaten the young women with various forms of violation. In the 1974 original, the police trace the calls to find they are coming from the housemother’s phone upstairs; in the 2006 remake, calls are eventually traced through *69, the automatic call-­back function (the same one Jill used to find what was left of Tiffany). And whereas the 1974 Black Christmas assures us that there is only one caller—all the other voices are being condensed and ventriloquized by Billy—the 2006 version

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Figure 2. The sorority house phone. Film still, Black Christmas, dir. Bob Clark, 1974

introduces a sister, Agnes, who had been cryptically named in the original movie but who now joins in on the terrorizing. Whereas the singular caller and receiver of When a Stranger Calls have led us to see how the self frays in a network of connectivity, Black Christmas places us already in a network of multiple callers, multiple receivers, multiple desirers, multiple killers. Cell telephony in Stranger may have suggested that there was no “there” where a self could inhabit the space-­time of subjectivity, but Black Christmas leads us to conclude that there are too many theres to lend the concept of “there” any interpretive sense. The interpersonal and familial networks of the 1974 Black Christmas make the telephone the perfect metaphor for the subject’s will to continuity in a discontinuous world. Distinct voices and discontinuous subjectivities from Billy’s past are gathered together in his head and larynx from which they are transmitted across a single phone line to the receiver of the downstairs telephone, around which the (distinct, discontinuous) sorority sisters gather to listen (see figure 2). The telephone’s formal connectivity of discontinuous subjects is paralleled in the content of the voices on the phone, which range from expressions of desire to have sex with and/or kill the sorority sisters to a wailing for family unity. “What your mother and I must know,” intones a voice that must be the father’s, “is, where did you put the baby, Billy? Where did you put Agnes?” Director Bob Clark offers no Psycho-­like explanation for Billy’s condition (we would not get that until 2006), but it is clear that Billy is driven—and riven—by the desire to bring his childhood self, his sister, and his parents together into some sort of whole. As Bataille would have it, though, that continuous whole is as terri-

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fying as its alternative: at one point midway through the film, the hysterically polyphonic voices give way to a sonically clear and univocal plea, “Help me. Please stop. Oh God, please. Help me.” Like Duncan, Billy agonizes over the desire to connect and the desire to be discontinuous: to paraphrase Duncan, he doesn’t exist, but he still has to come back. Billy’s uncanny practice of drawing together multiple, discontinuous voices and monologizing them through the telephone is heightened by the fact that in 1974 the murderer remains acousmatized. We never see him speak and can only trust the other characters’ perception that he “does” all the voices.21 In 2006, we do get a de-­acousmatizing, but with a difference: we see Agnes repeatedly speak, and we see Agnes repeatedly murder, but what we don’t see, curiously, is either Billy or Agnes talking on the phone. We hear Billy’s voice only once in the film (or once that we can be sure of ), in the flashback to that fateful, remarkable unmerry Christmas in which he avenges himself on his dreadful mother. Billy phones her to echo back to her what she said to him about baby Agnes: “She’s my family now.” Knowing something is terribly wrong, the mother races through the house until she finds Billy attacking Agnes and eating one of her eyeballs. Moments later, he kills both mother and stepfather, turns his mother’s flesh into Christmas cookies, and bakes and eats her. Fifteen years later he returns from prison, mysteriously joined by Agnes, who has also been institutionalized all this time, and the phone calls and murders begin again. However, while many of the murders are clearly performed by Agnes, the phone caller remains unidentifiable. It may be Billy or Agnes, both or neither. And the content of the calls does little to help. Amid the vocal rattling and threatening, screaming and ventriloquizing, the phone calls repeatedly intone that someone is “my family now.” “My family”—that which is connected to and phantasmatically continuous with me, Ma Bell, Bell’s Watson—is spoken in the film not only by child Billy to nasty mommy, but nasty mommy to baby Agnes, sorority sister to sorority sister, boyfriends to girlfriends, girlfriends to other sisters’ family members, housemothers to students, and on and on throughout the film. If there is a de-­acousmatizing going on in this movie, it takes place across a totally promiscuous network of villains and victims alike. Pace Mladen Dolar, attaching a voice to a body has nothing to do with weakening and castration; rather, it is the uncanny effect of an obsessive drive to continuity that networks and demolishes at the same time. Cinematically, then, the Black Christmas series replaces Chion’s “voice that sees” with an “eye that hears.” In the 1974 version of the movie,

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Figure 3. Agnes eats an eyeball. Film still, Black X-mas, dir. Glen Morgan, 2006

Figure 4. Flying eyeball screen saver. Film still, Black X-mas, dir. Glen Morgan, 2006

a character named Peter tries to stop his girlfriend Jess (the film’s heroine, played by Olivia Hussey) from aborting their child: he chides her that she speaks of an abortion as if it were “like having a wart removed.” Jess then hears the phrase again, lobbed at her over the phone during one of the murderer’s calls, which emphasizes the sonic nature of gothic terrorism.22 If the Jill Johnsons of When a Stranger Calls were plagued by the idea that the stranger could see them—even though, in the fixed-­line telephone version we know better—the college students of Black Christmas believe that they can be heard. They sure can, but not in the way that early telephone terror films would make the party line or the telephone extension the medium by which one could eavesdrop (think Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number): the 2006 Black X-­mas is littered with shots of eyeballs looking out of posters, through holes in walls, up from displaced floor tiles, into and out of prison-­door peepholes, even within screen savers (see figures 3 and 4). Seeing and hearing fuse as sorority sisters are murdered equally for their cell phones and their eyeballs, the former to phone the survivors, the latter

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to provide Agnes with a snack before she festoons her Christmas tree with eyeless heads (accompanied by observations such as “He’s my family now” and “Everyone should be home for Christmas”). The point here, I think, is to replace the traditional, foreboding sense of surveillance by the panoptic eye with the new sense that, in our cellular culture, we are always under a kind of sonic surveillance, that our speech, our sound, and our acts of sounding are now the object of the gaze.23 Although cell phones cannot be on party lines, overheard through extensions, or easily traced to a precise locale, our ability to generate telephonic speech everywhere and anywhere to someone anywhere and everywhere has brought the all-­seeing eye to the ear. Our telephonic continuities are the perfect uninterrupted spectacle. As Guy Rosolato has argued, the subject lives within a “sonorous envelope” because the ear cannot streamline the stimulation it receives.24 The eye sees hemispherically, but the ear perceives what is behind it as well. At the same time, though, the ear cannot match the eye for the distance across which it can perceive and understand sensory data. The cell phonic eye-that-hears does both. Babysitter, Don’t You See I’m Burning? Let’s return one last time to the cultural statistics on cell phone use. In spite of Baudrillard’s claim that digital networks are “devoid of any symbolic organization or overarching purpose” (Transparency, 76), the cell phone as a thing has an enormous symbolic function. José García-­Montes, Domingo Caballero-­Muñoz, and Marino Pérez-­Álvarez argue that the feeling of safety guaranteed by cellular connectivity does not actually depend on there being someone else to talk to. Rather, given that the idea of cell phone security is more prevalent among women than among men, “it has been found that approximately 60 percent of women display their mobile phone when alone in the public (a much higher proportion than the 47 percent of men in the same situation). This statistic reflects the experience of many women, who claim that the cellphone is an instrument for deterring undesired attention.”25 In the United States, this display of digital weaponry goes one step further to create a phantasmatic other to whom one is connected: technology analyst James E. Katz has found that one in four people surveyed have “pretended to talk on the mobile phone when there was actually no one on the other end of the line.”26 What I find interesting here is not simply that the cell phone signals to others that one is armed and ready for battle, nor am I most taken with the opposite implication, that

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the mobile encourages a receding from public space—what Erving Goffman calls “civil inattention”27—that is as likely to make a caller walk out in front of a bus as it is to protect her from stalkers. Rather, I find fascinating the ways in which cell phone users manufacture a ghostly, dematerialized presence as an interlocutor. One becomes a ghost talking to a ghost or a schizophrenic wired to the wireless. Judging from these studies, cell telephony has not signaled the end of metaphor, as Baudrillard suggested in my discussion above, but has created new metaphors for the networking subject: while we may no longer be fixed in space to communicate, across distance, with an other, we now inhabit an amorphous plane somewhere between connectedness to the world at large and social insularity, and between the embodiedness of speaking subjects and their discorporeality. Our being-­ in-­the-­world has become something of a not-­being-­while-­on-­the-­phone, as the desire we have for another radiates outward to form nothing more than a desirous relation toward our selves, a relation both confirmed and cut off by our own sonorous envelopes. Telephone terror movies have understood this “call as death sentence” since their popularity in the 1970s.28 When Jill Johnson repeatedly receives the ominous call to check the children, when she is continually being summoned to the place of their death and dismemberment, she—and we—join in the fantasy of that famous mourning father in Freud, the father whose dead dream-­child visits him to ask, “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?”29 The children, already dead, call out to be recognized in their deaths, just as the now-­dead Lenz family call out through Billy’s telephonic ventriloquism so that they, too, speak from beyond the grave. And it is a fantasy in which we are all eager to participate: we flock to cell phone terror movie remakes of the new millennium to check the children once more to ensure that they aren’t burning (or to ensure that they are); we repeatedly, obsessively place and answer digital calls even though (or because) all evidence suggests that the call will end in disconnection, loss of service, unavailable parties, dead agents; we bury our loved ones with their cell phones should they need or want to call us from beyond the grave.30 When a stranger calls on his cell phone (or yours), it may then be to metaphorize telephony itself in the contemporary age, to mirror acoustically the rhizomic deracinations of the phantasmatic subject in a world of digital desire. When a stranger calls on his cell phone (or yours), it may be to present through the voice that sees or the eye that hears what we do when we repeatedly, obsessively turn to the phone. When a stranger calls, it may be to take us beyond the pleasure principle to the discommunicating space where the Freudian child throws out

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the line and reels it back in to find what he wants on the other end, which is the end itself—the end of the line, the end of communication, the end of any desire that might be satisfied. Notes 1

2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10

11

Morgan’s remake changes the title of the original to Black X-­mas. I retain that spelling throughout. However, for the sake of clarity, I will also insert the year of release whenever it seems helpful. Since the remake of When a Stranger Calls retains the original title, I will also refer to both films by year of release as well as by title. Stephen King, Cell (New York: Scribner, 2006). Lara Srivastava, “Mobile Phones and the Evolution of Social Behaviour,” Behaviour and Information Technology 24.2 (2005): 111. New York Times cited in George Myerson, Heidegger, Habermas, and the Mobile Phone (Reading, UK: Cox and Wyman, 2001), 8–9. José M. García-­Montes, Domingo Caballero-­Muñoz, and Marino Pérez-­Álvarez, “Changes in the Self Resulting from the Use of Mobile Phones,” Media, Culture and Society 28.1 (2006): 67. Srivastava, “Mobile Phones,” 120. García-­Montes, Caballero-­Muñoz, and Pérez-­Álvarez, “Changes in the Self,” 77. Ibid., 76. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology—Schizophrenia—Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 324. For a more complete discussion of the telephone’s phantasmatic qualities, see Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Sconce argues that spectral dematerialization was made all the more pronounced early in the twentieth century with the invention of wireless technology. Situating the discourse of wireless communication within late nineteenth-­ century American spiritualism, Sconce detects “an entirely new metaphor of liquidity in telecommunications by replacing the concept of the individuated ‘stream’ [of consciousness, but also of dyadic communication] with that of a vast etheric ocean” (ibid., 14), what we might call in the twenty-­first century a “network.” This increasing idea of “abandoned bodies and dispersed consciousness,” Sconce argues, produced in the telecommunicating subject a sense of melancholia that, in its extreme versions, became fear and paranoia; some citizens saw “an eerie and even sinister undercurrent to the new electronic worlds forged by wireless” (62). Spiritualist communication with the dead, the resurrecting of the voices of history, the speaking of a subject who could be anywhere and everywhere—all this, Sconce says, “provided a giddy sense of liberation for some, [but] also threatened the security and stability of an older social order in which body and mind had been for the most part coterminous” (63). Thus wireless technology presented a paradox that I want to suggest laid crucial ground for twenty-­ first-century cell phone terror movies: “alone at their crystal sets and radios, listeners felt a kinship with an invisible, scattered audience, and yet they were also acutely aware of the incredible distances involved in this form of communication that ultimately reaffirmed the individual listener’s anonymity and isolation” (62). Ronell, Telephone, 228.

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15 16 17 18

19

20

21

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Ibid., 87. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (New York: Verso, 1993), 68. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Transparency. Ellis Hanson, “The Telephone and Its Queerness,” in Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality, ed. Sue-­Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 45. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 15. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Erotism. While When a Stranger Calls is the most famous of babysitting horror movies, the craze actually began the year before, with John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 68. Michel Chion, Audio-­Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as Audio-­Vision. Dolar, A Voice, 67. Dolar’s point is an application to When a Stranger Calls of Chion’s original insight, “An inherent quality of the acousmêtre,” he suggests, “is that it can be instantly dispossessed of its mysterious powers . . . when it is de-­acousmatized, when the film reveals the face that is the source of the voice” (Chion, Audio-­Vision, 130). Here director Simon West departs from the contemporary cultural obsession with explaining why villains are as they are, what makes them tick. One need think only of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (New York: Delacorte Press, 1999), Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), or the 2006 remake of Black X-­mas to see the compulsion we have for providing our evildoers with tragic backstories. Interestingly, this concordia discors develops gradually over the film’s plot. The university students initially believe there are numerous callers, but they tacitly come to agree with Lieutenant Fuller (John Saxon)’s notion that there is only one killer speaking in many voices. This has a delightful resonance with The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin, 1973), where Father Merrin corrects Father Kerris’s observations that Regan seems to have manifested three different personalities. Says Merrin, “There is only one.” It is worth observing here that blocking character Peter’s crisis in the 1974 film has to do with abortion and longevity, the very stuff of Bataille’s ideas on continuity, discontinuity, and death. Peter as antagonist is displaced in 2006 into Kyle, whose means of pestering his girlfriend Kelli is not to make her choose between life and death but to be exposed through his nasty habit of filming women while he’s having sex with them, films that then show up on the Internet. As I have argued throughout this essay, 1970s fixed-­line phone movies are obsessed with the vicissitudes of the individual subject within questions of life and death; 2006 digitally inflected movies are obsessed with the ways in which characters become “networked out” into multiple sites. Desires and their representations proliferate endlessly because digitally. For a full discussion of the paranoia of the telephone in its conventional, fixed-­line form, see Hanson, “The Telephone and Its Queerness.” Guy Rosolato, “La Voix: entre corps et langage,” Revue française de psychanalyse 38.1 (1974): 79. García-­Montes, Caballero-­Muñoz, and Pérez-­Álvarez, “Changes,” 77.

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27 28 29

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James E. Katz, “Mobile Communications and the Transformation of Daily Life: The Next Phase of Research on Mobiles,” Knowledge, Technology, and Policy 19.1 (2006): 68, my emphasis. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: Free Press, 1963). Ronell, Telephone, 6. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 5, Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part), trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1958), 509. Katz, “Mobile Communications,” 69.

Caetlin Benson-­Allott The Chora Line: RealD Incorporated

What the majority of spectators seem to want and value from animation is not a gloss on “metaphysical effort” but rather . . . “metaphysical release”— that is, the vicarious playing out of the “plasmatic possibilities” for subverting and/or substituting the laws of physics (and here I might add, the laws of mathematical calculation) with the laws of imagination. —Vivian Sobchack, “Final Fantasies” Be careful what you wish for. —Coraline

​Before Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2009) grossed $2.7 billion in worldwide ticket sales, Henry Selick’s Coraline (2009) was widely hailed as the best 3-­D movie ever made.1 By offering uncanny adventure “for brave children of all ages,”2 Coraline bestowed RealD stereoscopic filmmaking with artistic and cultural prestige, affirming theater owners’ and cinemagoers’ growing interest in digital cinema. Film distributors were already sold. For the past eleven years, they had pressured exhibitors to adopt a digital delivery and projection system and abandon expensive celluloid prints. Distributors also wanted exhibitors to pay for this technological overhaul, but theater owners did not fore-

The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:3, Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-1275815 © 2011 Duke University Press

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see any recompense in replacing their existing celluloid projectors with digital systems. RealD gave them a reason to convert, however, when early experiments like Chicken Little 3D (dir. Mark Dindal, 2005) and Beowulf 3D (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 2007) demonstrated that more viewers would come out—and pay more per ticket—to see movies in digital 3-­D.3 Subsequently Coraline, Up (dir. Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009), Avatar, and Alice in Wonderland (dir. Tim Burton, 2010) launched a genre of high-­profile, high-­ concept digital 3-­D films and demonstrated that RealD technology could be exceedingly profitable for all involved. Ironically, the spectatorial pleasures of RealD are nowhere near as clear as the profits; no one has yet explored what value this third dimension adds to the spectatorial experience to make it worth more to viewers. Previous incarnations of three-­dimensional cinema—such as the red-­and-­ cyan anaglyph system of the 1950s or the (analog) polarized Stereovision of the early 1980s—came and went quickly and without lasting industrial or aesthetic impact, but RealD is proving much more popular with viewers, popular enough that major studios (specifically DreamWorks Animation SKG) are converting entirely to 3-­D production. Indeed, Samsung recently introduced consumer-­grade 3-­D HDTV sets to capitalize on the success of RealD. Thus it is time to investigate what sort of desire digital 3-­D produces and satisfies in its spectators and how it integrates itself into Western systems of representation. To paraphrase Vivian Sobchack’s earlier work on two-­dimensional digital animation, we need to ask what we want from RealD and what RealD wants from us: what new dimension is it opening up?4 Henry Selick’s Coraline occasions related questions about desire, space, and embodiment through its representation of a young girl opening the door onto an Other World hiding within her own. Unlike previous RealD features, Coraline harnesses the uncanniness of stereoscopic animation and uses it to acknowledge and produce a locus for the digital uncanny.5 The film’s manipulation of biocular vision offers viewers a new receptacle for the uncanniness of digital verisimilitude, namely, its virtual depth of field. By exploiting biocular vision as binocular vision, the film returns our natural stereoscopy to us as mediated spectacle and as uncanny in the Freudian sense. In both its optics and its metaphysical tropes, Selick’s film suggests that RealD is “nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-­established in the mind and which has become alienated from it.”6 In short, Coraline promotes the uncanniness of the digital image to give its spectator a new experience of—one might even say, a new standard for—

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visual verisimilitude that can replace indexical realism as the latter is rendered obsolete by digital image capture, distribution, and exhibition. Coraline’s narrative also naturalizes this uncanny third dimension by incorporating it into an ongoing debate about the relationship between form, matter, and femininity. Both the film’s title and its representation of the new dimensionality of the image evoke Plato’s chora, the receptacle “at the very foundations of the concept of spatiality.”7 Coraline thus recalls recent debates among Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, and others about the chora’s significance as a metaphysical figure—the unintelligible space that gives form to matter—and a trope within traditional patriarchal theories of representation. Grosz suggests that the chora “contains an irreducible, yet often overlooked connection with the functions of femininity,” which emerges in Coraline as the Beldam, a wicked witch who lives outside yet supports the materialist and gender-­ normative fantasies of Coraline’s world (“Woman, Chora, Dwelling,” 24). Through the Beldam, Coraline gives the chora a voice and a character, one who wants to imagine herself as an Other Mother and her house as a nurturing receptacle outside the ever-­changing world but who is ultimately undone by her desire to incorporate as well as produce. As the maternal threat of jouissance, the Beldam provides the film with an occasion to perform material excess and a means to represent both the allure and the horror of a virtual world. The virtual depths associated with the Beldam render RealD visible as a dematerialized inscriptional space in which relationships between form and matter, ideal and embodiment, can be worked out. To that end, the gendered terms of Coraline’s narrative invite the spectator to reconsider the patriarchal dynamics behind the Western metaphysics of representation. By focusing on Coraline’s depiction of the Beldam and the formation of her character, I suggest that the film uses its chora to produce a “bridge between the intelligible and the sensible, mind and body” that can replace celluloid’s indexical invocation of the material while also providing catharsis for that loss (ibid., 112). The film realizes these tensions through its animation technique, which enables it to contemplate figurally the transition into and out of materiality. Coraline’s stop-­motion technology blends computer-­designed profilmic models and the special effects of computer-­ generated imagery (CGI) to place the uncanny frisson of stop-­motion in conversation with the uncanny surplus of digital 3-­D projection. Thus as it shifts between digital and analog image production, the film invites the

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spectator to meditate on the psychic dynamics of dimensionality—not to mention the gendered dynamics of materiality. As Sianne Ngai has argued, the inherent instability of stop-­motion produces a tendency toward excessive movement.8 For the spectator, stop-­motion resembles an apparatus always on the verge of escaping, running amok, subverting the social hierarchies of the bodies and matter it is asked to produce. Coraline builds on the racialized overtones of excessive animation and the uncontrollable animatedness of its stop-­motion to capture the instability of matter and image, as well as the inherent uncanniness of the body, and offer them back to the spectator as the RealD experience.

Technically, any film not computer-­animated or illustrated by hand could be described as stop-­motion; at its most basic level, stop-­motion animation describes any filmic record of a physical, profilmic model that moves or is moved between frames. The earliest surviving stop-­motion movie dates from 1902 and revels in the expressive potential of material manipulation. In Fun in a Bakery Shop (dir. Edwin S. Porter), a baker smothers an intruding rat with a lump of dough and then delights in molding the latter into a series of facial likenesses. Subsequent animators advanced this technique with puppets and model animation, which uses internally framed dolls to create the illusion of motion. Because model animation requires extremely exacting adjustments between shots, 1940s stop-­motion artists turned to replacement animation, swapping out different modular components of a doll between shots, and their 1970s counterparts developed Claymation, which uses wire skeletons coated in plasticine to increase pliability. Although replacement animation first entered Hollywood through George Pal’s Puppetoons in 1940, it did not yield a full feature until Henry Selick’s The Nightmare before Christmas (1993). Selick continued to explore replacement animation in James and the Giant Peach (1996) and Monkeybone (2001) before turning briefly to computer animation for Coraline’s predecessor, Moongirl (2005). In this digital short, a young boy travels to the moon, meets its current protectress, and helps her defeat the evil ghosts who would darken it. Moongirl anticipates Coraline’s interest in the relationship of (outer) space to image production, and it also marks an important evolution in Selick’s approach to animation. Before RealD brought stereoscopy into the twenty-­first century, computer animation was widely marketed as 3-­D animation because it employs virtual three-­dimensional models to produce its two-­dimensional graphics. Selick’s brief foray into

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computer animation for Moongirl thus suggests an aesthetic preparation for Coraline’s subsequent experiments with perspective. As animation legend Ray Harryhausen recently observed, “Many of the techniques used in stop-­motion animation are part of the process in preparing CGI work.”9 Both Moongirl and Coraline invite the spectator to reflect on the fluidity between matter and image, modeling and three-­dimensional image production, that defines the latter film. Indeed, Selick’s 2009 stop-­motion feature is visually distinct from— yet shares many production techniques with—other computer-­animated features released that year. Most computer-­animated films use virtual models designed through mathematical (usually Cartesian) coordinate systems to make two-­dimensional images look three-­dimensional. These virtual models are often based on artists’ three-­dimensional sculptures, and in that sense, CGI animation was designated “3-­D animation” because it looked like stop-­motion animation (or at least more like it than cell animation ever could) while also offering the smooth transitions and impossible effects typically associated with cell animation. Today, stop-­motion is able to mimic computer animation’s smoothness and surrealism by (re)materializing digital models. Three-­dimensional printers, colloquially known as fabbers, enabled Selick and Laika Studios to manufacture quickly the thousands of modular components needed to animate a feature-­length stop-­ motion film. Without digital models and three-­dimensional printing, Laika could never have produced the 15,300 faces necessary for Coraline’s twenty-­ one characters to replicate human speech and expressions. Thus Coraline’s blend of computer-­designed stop-­motion puppetry and computer-­aided special effects returns 3-­D animation to its historic medium while also bringing stop-­motion into the future of three-­ dimensional film: RealD. RealD is the most popular digital technology for projecting stereoscopic images, and although it has competitors, such as Dolby 3D and MasterImage 3D, it controls 90 percent of contemporary theatrical three-­dimensional exhibition.10 Most of its perceived competitors are actually licensed corporate partners—for example, Disney Digital 3D—or are not actually digital, such as the original IMAX 3D system. RealD uses a liquid crystal adapter attached to a digital projector to polarize 144 frames per second in opposite directions, half clockwise and half counterclockwise.11 For a viewer wearing RealD’s polarized glasses, each eye picks up only every other image, while the distance between these images on-­screen creates a variable illusion of depth. Because RealD uses polarization instead of the traditional red-­and-­cyan anaglyphs, it produces

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higher levels of color saturation and sharper image resolution than its predecessor. RealD also alleviates the eyestrain and ghosting, or fringes of color around imperfectly aligned 3-­D images, that bothered viewers of previous 3-­D platforms, and it allows viewers to turn or tilt their heads without ruining the illusion. In short, RealD enables 3-­D viewers to experience themselves as three-­dimensionally enworlded, to inhabit an embodied spectatorial practice foreclosed by previous 3-­D technologies. Viewers can now move in three dimensions while watching a movie that features and is about three-­dimensionality; for the first time, they can experience 3-­D vision as properly uncanny rather than simply unwieldy.

Coraline engages RealD’s new three-­dimensional visuality with a narrative about the problems of gender, vision, and identity. Thus it dramatizes the chora line, or the contested genealogy of materiality and maternity, femininity and form. The movie begins when its eponymous young heroine (voiced by Dakota Fanning) moves with her parents into the Pink Palace, a subdivided mansion outside Ashland, Oregon. Its opening vista also announces its entry into film history, because the establishing shot of the Pink Palace recreates Gregg Toland’s famous establishing shot of Xanadu, the stately pleasure dome of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) (see figure 1). In Citizen Kane, Toland pans up a series of increasingly ornate fences before Xanadu finally appears, an architectural behemoth, behind Charles Foster Kane’s monogrammed gate. The mansion reigns over a series of abandoned animals and pleasure crafts like a warning: be careful what you wish for. Toland’s Xanadu is a matte painting, but its stature and superimposed foregrounds nonetheless introduce the viewer to the film’s innovative deep-­focus photography, the technique that would make both Toland and Citizen Kane legendary. Coraline cites this moment of invention through its establishing shot of a similarly menacing mansion on a hill, and its house likewise heralds the arrival of a new form of visual pleasure. For as the family’s silver VW Bug weaves up through the foreground, past the sign for the Pink Palace and into Coraline’s new milieu, the viewer becomes aware of the various planes of image within a 3-­D motion picture. The film thus draws on Toland’s celebrated deep-­focus cinematography to contextualize RealD stereoscopy as another technological advancement in cinematic art. Citizen Kane becomes the background for Coraline’s 3-­D gimmickry, the credential behind more typical aesthetic conventions, such as aiming sewing needles and other protrusions at the viewer’s eyes.

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Figure 1. Coraline cites Citizen Kane’s legendary deep-­focus cinematography as a historical precedent for its stereoscopic artistry. Film still, Coraline, dir. Henry Selick, 2009

Unfortunately, Coraline’s characters begin their adventures on a less optimistic note. Coraline’s parents (voiced by Terri Hatcher and John Hodgman) were recently involved in an automobile collision that, as the film implies, may have been Coraline’s fault. Her mother is now confined to a neck brace and incapable of turning her head (unlike the spectator). Between unpacking and finishing an overdue writing assignment, she has little time to attend to her daughter’s loneliness and frustration, which only increase when Coraline meets her new neighbor, a know-­it-­all boy named Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.). Wybie introduces himself by making fun of Coraline’s dowsing rod and calling her a water witch; later he apologizes by giving her a doll. Still Coraline’s dissatisfaction continues to mount, until she discovers a child-­size door hidden beneath the living room wallpaper. Her mother brusquely reveals the door’s bricked-­over opening, but Coraline’s neighbors—Mr. Bobinsky (Ian Shane), the irradiated and irrational shut-­in in the attic, and Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French), the bickering former burlesque queens who live in the basement—nonetheless warn her not to go through it. Naturally, Coraline goes to bed that night thinking of nothing else and subsequently dreams (or discovers) that the small door leads to an Other World. This Other World is an exercise in cinematic spectacle and the uncanny wonders of RealD. Coraline’s transition into her new world begins when she follows one of Mr. Bobinsky’s never-­before-­seen trained mice and glimpses its impossible disappearance behind the bricked-­up door. When she opens the door, a long fleshy passageway unfurls in front of her, its dynamic dilation suggesting that this is no ordinary vaginal tunnel. In its 3-­D undulations, it both resembles and surpasses the fleshy gates of hell

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that carry off little Carol Anne in Poltergeist (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982). Coraline might not appreciate that comparison, however, as she seems pretty touchy about her name; for some reason, people in her world keep calling her Caroline. Coraline soon discovers that in the Other World, everyone knows her name—and what she likes to eat, and how she likes to garden, and why she feels unsatisfied at home. Her spectacular reception begins in the kitchen, where her Other Mother (also Teri Hatcher) immediately greets Coraline with a cornucopia of delectable comfort foods and, with the help of Coraline’s Other Father (also John Hodgman), showers her with the attention she desperately craves. Entranced, Coraline soon returns to the Other World for more attention and s(t)imulation. Her Other Mother seems perfectly prepared to oblige, producing for Coraline a veritable wonderland of delights, delights that all happen to play to the strengths of RealD. At the Other Mother’s behest, Coraline’s Other Father flies her through a glowing garden of animated flowers and tickling vines; later an ersatz-­Wybie escorts her to see Mr. Bobinsky’s mythical mouse circus and a revival of Spink and Forcible’s old burlesque acts, including a trapeze number in which they shed their aging, overweight bodies and emerge the starlets they may never have been.12 These phantasmatic visions defy the laws of botany, biology, and physiology; they are wonders, and as such they emphasize the wonder of RealD cinema: reality, uncannily enhanced. When Coraline returns from her tour, the Other Mother offers her an opportunity to join this spectacular world forever, but to become part of the ensemble, Coraline must give up her role as a spectator. Specifically, she must allow its matriarch to sew buttons over her eyes. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud encourages his reader to regard such threats as castration anxiety, but Coraline uses a less phallocentric metaphor: incorporation. After Coraline refuses to become part of the Other Mother’s world, she attempts to return to her normal world by going to sleep but quickly finds that she can no longer slip between states so easily. Coraline then tries to leave the Other Mother’s terrain on foot and discovers that this world responds to laws of psychoaesthetic—rather than terrestrial—distance. As Coraline marches away from the Other Mother’s unheimlich home, the woods around her devolve, becoming increasingly pale, unearthly, and abstract. At first, they seem to reveal themselves as images, specifically as storyboard sketches of trees, but later they dissolve entirely, leaving Coraline lost in a blank white field. Fortunately, a wise feral cat (Keith David) arrives to talk her through her predicament; he explains that the Other Mother “only made what she knew would impress you.” When Coraline asks

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why the Other Mother wants her so badly, the cat corrects her solipsism; the Other Mother does not desire Coraline specifically, just “someone to love—I think. Something that isn’t her. Or maybe she’d just love something to eat.” Coraline finds out precisely what that means when she and the cat arrive right back where they started. Enraged by Coraline’s resistance, the Other Mother throws her through a mirror into a dimly lit holding cell between image regimes, until she can “learn to be a loving daughter.” Had she read her Freud, Coraline might recognize the Other Mother’s conflicting desires as incorporation, as the desire to fuse with and cannibalize a love object.13 During incorporation, the subject takes in an outside object but cannot integrate it, an inability that, as Jacques Derrida explains, both fortifies and threatens the ego: “Incorporation is a kind of theft to reappropriate the pleasure object. But that reappropriation is simultaneously rejected: which leads to the paradox of a foreign body preserved as foreign but by the same token excluded from a self that thenceforth deals not with the other, but only with itself.”14 Thus the Other Mother confines Coraline to the mirror room, her chamber of incorporation—what Derrida calls “the crypt . . . the vault of desire”—both to exile and to contain her.15 There Coraline meets the Other Mother’s Other Children, all of whom gave up their eyes—and gradually their entire embodiment—to the Other Mother, whom they call the Beldam. The Other Children explain to Coraline that after they let the Beldam sew buttons over their eyes, they forgot their names and eventually lost their bodies as well—a cryptic introduction to matter and metaphysics. The ghosts beg Coraline to find their eyes and thereby release what remains of their souls, but she resists until she escapes and discovers that the Beldam has also incorporated her parents. Then, armed with a magic monocle made of saltwater taffy, Coraline returns to the Other World to reexamine the three spectacles that previously captivated her: the garden, the mouse circus, and the burlesque show. Each one turns out to be animated by a brightly colored marble (one of the ghosts’ eye-­souls), but when Coraline confronts the Beldam with her plunder, the witch does not simply release her prisoners as promised. Instead, she shatters her illusory Other World and reveals the sticky spider’s web undergirding its architecture of incorporation. Here, RealD and the conventions of geometrical perspective—most notably, the vanishing point—unite to reveal the depth of the trap Coraline has wandered into (see figure 2). Coraline tries to climb the sides of this monstrous net, but her only egress is the vaginal tunnel, now brown, desiccated, and cluttered with cobwebs. When Coraline attempts to close the

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Figure 2. Coraline races to escape the Beldam’s stereoscopic web of de-­formation. Film still, Coraline, dir. Henry Selick, 2009

door on this barren canal, she inadvertently catches the Beldam between worlds, severing the Beldam’s right hand. In the film’s denouement, Coraline must dispose of this amputated claw by returning it to another (infertile) vagina, this time an abandoned well. Only then are the Pink Palace and its occupants safe from feminine incorporation.16

Throughout this narrative, Coraline’s figural focus on webs, wells, caves, and portals unifies its metaphoric and technological interests. As Wired columnist Frank Rose observes, the new digital 3-­D “is even better at sucking you in—into the endless shadows of a cave or into the vortex of a shrieking face.”17 Indeed, Western theories of perspective have long emphasized depth over protrusion. From Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435 treatise on painting, De pictura, to the contemporary cinema screen, dominant representational traditions have conditioned viewers to experience the image as a window. The physics of projection also make it extremely difficult for a film image to occlude its frame and appear to pop into the theater. For that reason, stereoscopic film has always been better at creating illusions of depth than at extending images out at the audience. In fact any would-­be protuberances seem in some ways recognizable as a convention in the U.S. 3-­D genre precisely because of their failure, because they make the spectacle of 3-­D visible instead of blending into the diegesis. Coraline’s many caverns and cavities do not exactly disappear into the narrative, but they do make visible the narrative’s investment in what its technology makes possible. Moreover, these stereoscopic vaginal spectacles enable us to see how contemporary philosophical debates about the chora elucidate current ques-

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tions about the ontology of the image, particularly the crisis of form and index brought on by digital media. The chora—or khōra—refers to the zone in which form is imprinted on matter, “the space within which the sensible copy of the intelligible is inscribed.”18 The term originates in Plato’s Timaeus, during the eponymous character’s discourse on the origin of the universe: how Demiurge created the gods, who were unchangeable and unchanging, and the world, which changes. In this cosmology, ideal and unchanging form must be imparted to changeable matter. The space within which this happens, although part of matter, cannot take on any of the forms that pass through it; thus Timaeus characterizes this space—or interval, since it represents both a physical and a temporal alterity—as that which “comes to be but never is.”19 It exceeds representation and cannot possess any characteristics of its own, yet somehow it still seems to have a gender—or rather its narrator seems unable to conceive its passivity outside a binary gender system. As “the receptacle of all material bodies,” the chora is both inherently unintelligible and feminine: “The mother and receptacle of every created thing, of all that is visible or otherwise perceptible, we shouldn’t call it earth or air or fire or water, or any of their compounds or constituents. And so we won’t go wrong if we think of it as an invisible, formless receptacle of everything.”20 Elsewhere, Timaeus describes the chora as “the nurse of creation that can only be grasped by a kind of bastard reasoning.”21 These metaphors, although not intended to describe the chora as it actually is, nonetheless produce a system of associations based on female anatomy and patriarchal interpretations of femininity. They thereby reduce both the chora and the feminine to passive and unimpressionable blankness. It is beyond the scope of this essay to rehearse the history of the chora from Plato to the present, but some French, Australian, and U.S. theorists have recently reinvigorated the term as a key concept for understanding the exclusion of women and the feminine from Western metaphysics. These reinvestigations, most profitably led by Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, and Judith Butler, often begin with Jacques Derrida’s reading of khōra as the ungendered, inassimilable origin of différance in Western philosophy. For Derrida, khōra is that which philosophy cannot incorporate: “Khōra reaches us, and as the name. . . . [But] it still remains alien to the person, only naming imminence, even only an imminence that is alien to the myth, the time, and the history of every possible promise and threat.”22 For Derrida, khōra must be understood as an aporia, which places it outside the realm of both the intelligible and the grammatical: “The definite article presupposes the

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existence of a thing, the existent khōra to which, via a common name, it would be easy to refer. But what is said of the khōra is that this name does not designate any of the known or recognized or, if you like, received types of existent” (“Khōra,” 236). Because “what there is, there, is not,” khōra as aporia should not bear a definite article (236). For the same reason, it cannot have a gender, which means that all the gendered metaphors Timaeus uses to describe khōra are catachreses; they mislead the reader into an overly definite sense of khōra’s nature: “To that end, it is necessary not to confuse it in a generality by properly attributing to it properties which would still be those of a determinate existent, one of the existents which it/ she ‘receives’ or whose image it/she receives: for example, an existent of the female gender—and that is why the femininity of the mother or the nurse will never be attributed to it/her as a property, something of her own” (237). Thus Derrida’s khōra may represent the principle of receivership, but it cannot take on—and should not be attributed the qualities of—any subjective positions associated with receivership or delivery, such as the mother or the nurse. These feminine figures represent barred destinations of incorporational desire; like the children the Other Mother craves, they are held at a distance that both underscores their inadequacy and perpetuates the fantasy of (never-­quite-­sustainable) materialization. Derrida’s attempt to cleanse khōra of gender has been rebuked by an international coterie of feminists, whose critiques contextualize my reading of the Beldam as a figure of the chora’s disavowed epistemological value, labor, and desires. In contradistinction to Derrida’s desexualized reading of khōra, Julia Kristeva uses the chora to describe the psychical space and process of signification. In the chora stage, an infant both finds all its needs satisfied by a (nondifferentiated) maternal body and experiences the first breaks between itself and that material plenitude—in short, the beginning of semiogenesis and subjectification.23 Kristeva emphasizes that “the mother’s body is therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations,” thus making it “the organizing principle” that precedes and underlies figuration and specularization.24 This reading, which interprets Derrida’s extragrammatical aporia as the founding state of semiosis, inaugurates contemporary debates about the chora’s gender (Is it maternal? Is it feminine?) and its ideological role (Can it experience desire or only produce it?), shaping subsequent interpretations of the chora and my reading of the Beldam. In 1974, the same year that Kristeva asserted the centrality of the maternal, feminine body to the subject’s experience of language, Luce Iri-

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garay employed the chora in a psychoanalytic explanation of the feminine’s exclusion from Western (which is to say patriarchal) metaphysics of representation. Judith Butler suggests that, like Derrida, Irigaray understands the chora to be “what must be excluded from the domain of philosophy for philosophy itself to proceed,”25 but she reads that exclusion as the very process through which the chora becomes (dis)figured as the feminine. Thus feminine metaphors for the chora are both catachreses and precisely on point: to the extent that the chora’s role in figuration can be understood as “participation by the non-­participant,” it makes the female present only to exclude it from the process of generation: “[Chora] is an approximate name chosen for a general conception; there is no intention of suggesting a complete parallel with motherhood. . . . By a remote symbolism, the nearest [its philosophers] could find, they indicate that Matter is sterile, not female to full effect, female in receptivity only, not in pregnancy.”26 In short, the chora manifests the patriarchal metaphysics endemic to Western theories of representation; as Elizabeth Grosz explains, “Even where women and femininity are not explicitly mentioned or evoked in philosophical and architectural texts, nonetheless they, and the concepts associated with them, serve as the unconscious, repressed or unspoken foundations of and guarantee for philosophical value” (“Woman, Chora, Dwelling,” 113). As a metonymy for the maternal—and thus the feminine—in the origins of Western metaphysics, the chora dehumanizes, disempowers, and dematerializes women, placing them outside the real in some Other Space. Like the Other Mother, the chora exists beyond and beneath material existence and makes the latter possible but only to be excluded from it. Her necessity contains the terms of her exile, and as Coraline suggests, any conscious resistance to that ontological servitude amounts to villainy. Coraline is a film about world building, about the desires behind the image and its relationship to space, and Grosz’s architectural focus in “Woman, Chora, Dwelling” helps us draw out those concepts’ significance for stop-­motion and 3-­D animation. Grosz contends that all Western architecture has been based on “the cultural refusal of women’s specificity or corporeal and conceptual autonomy and social value” (112). In Grosz’s reading, the chora designates a kind of barren femininity, an ungrounded, unspecified condition that can generate but cannot participate, “whose connections with women and female corporeality have been severed, producing a disembodied femininity as the ground for the production of a (conceptual and social) universe” (113). This nonspecificity marginalizes the feminine and essentially reverses its generative powers: “Though she

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[the chora] brings being into becoming she has neither being nor the possibilities of becoming; both the mother of all things and yet without ontological status, she designates less a positivity than an abyss” (116). Thus far Grosz’s assessment of the chora reproduces many key points raised by other scholars, but—quite significantly for my reading of the Beldam— she adds a Marxist analysis to her feminist critique, citing the obfuscation of labor inherent to the concept of chora: “It becomes a space of duty, of endless and infinitely repeatable chores that have no social value or recognition, the space of the affirmation and replenishment of others at the expense and erasure of the self ” (122). Thus the chora both does work and obscures work, the work required of women for the perpetuation of their own effacement.

Were she a philosopher, the Beldam might make a similar point: endlessly engaged in a production of the sensible, she exists as that which must be expelled and repressed for the real world to maintain its heteronormative futurity. Like the chora, she is an Other Mother vilified for her (allegedly) illegitimate desire to take in or take on materiality. Constantly looking for something to call her own, she tries to incorporate spectators into the worlds she materializes for them, but once they become hers, she finds that being cannot live up to form. Thus although she identifies herself as an Other Mother, it is equally helpful to call her by her other name, the Beldam. Originally used to designate any great-­grandmother or grandmother, by 1586 beldam began to refer to “any aged woman” but especially “a loathsome old woman, a hag; a witch, [and] a furious raging woman.”27 Thus she is both a figure of nurturance and reproduction and explicitly marked as barren. As Coraline’s Other Mother, the Beldam represents both the return of the maternal plenitude Coraline’s real mother cannot offer her (because she has a job and because Coraline is no longer an undifferentiated infant) and the threat of that plenitude. The Beldam is jouissance, and she makes jouissance visible through her ultimate annihilation of the symbolic Other World. Although the viewer does not officially meet the Beldam until the second act, she is actually the first character to appear in the movie, which begins with two disembodied hands made out of sewing needles deconstructing a young girl doll. We do not come face-to-face with the Beldam until Coraline goes through the portal into the Other World, where the Beldam tries to entice Coraline with her ideal home-­cooked meal. This exem-

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plar of feminine production creates an existential crisis for Coraline, who must learn to value material reality over virtual ideals. Belief in ideal forms is precisely what trapped the three Other Children, who haunt Coraline as both literal and figural failures. They failed to appreciate their material lives and to discern the Beldam’s desire, which is how they became trapped in her world of illusions. They are also aesthetic failures, their dialogue mawkish and their models hackneyed and unattractive. Nonetheless, the precise nature of their figural failure enables important observations about the film’s metaphoric investment in celluloid materiality. When Coraline first discovers the Other Children, hiding under a sheet inside the Beldam’s mirror-­limbo, they resemble bobbing balls of light. After Coraline removes their screen, they begin to float and flicker around her, their images literally ghosting like bad 3-­D anaglyphs. In short, the movie uses tropes of celluloid cinematicity to suggest that these children have passed away. Whereas Coraline’s model exudes reliable material fortitude, the Other Children resemble poorly projected film and thereby connote death within the film, the death of film, and the death that has always haunted film. Their limbo is the lifedeath Alan Cholodenko describes as undergirding all animation, “the spectre in the screen [that] gives all form, but is ‘itself ’ never given as such.”28 The ghost children invite one to reread the cinema for the inanimation haunting all animation, to regard the projector as an apparatus that gives existence to intelligibility, that—like the chora—must be excluded from the representable world and its animating principle. Yet even as it sets its cinematic ghost children apart as failures, Coraline reverses the power structure inherent in animation’s lifedeath and Plato’s chora. Unlike her precedents, Coraline’s Beldam is both a crucible of materiality and spectacle, and capable of divorcing intelligibility and sensibility when she feels she is not being appreciated. As Coraline races to defuse the Beldam’s world of wonders, the Beldam vents her frustration by dematerializing that world, first erasing color and then tearing up the woods and gardens around the Other Pink Palace, leaving only a gray haze. This ruination very much resembles a conceptual inversion of Dorothy’s escape from the gray plains of Kansas in Victor Fleming’s Wizard of Oz (1939), as now the Technicolor Oz is pulled out from under the little girl who could not appreciate its illusions. The Beldam demolishes the domestic spectacle inside her Pink Palace as well, ripping up the floorboards and stripping the paper from the walls. Previously, the Beldam had always been an engine of materialization; now she throws that engine into reverse, the

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maternal jouissance withdrawing its previous support of the symbolic and destructuring her world. To be sure, Coraline does not sympathize with the Beldam in this rebellion; it represents her exposed web as a space of decay and absorption (desanguinated bugs and all). When the chora demands acknowledgment for her work, Coraline characterizes it as a space of selfish reception. Thus it leaves the Beldam trapped alone in her own web, blind and maimed, even as it gives her a chance to articulate her desire: “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me. I’ll die without you.” Coraline is hardly sympathetic to the chora’s line (what child wants to hear that its mother has needs too?), but by offering its material functionary a chance to explain, the film seems to suggest that it wants to understand its own uncanny animating principle. Like the filmmakers themselves, the Beldam has brought dolls and worlds to life for her spectators’ amusement. Coraline rejects such ersatz worlds as crypts; she seems to believe, like Derrida, that “the inhabitant of a crypt is always a living dead, a dead entity we are perfectly willing to keep alive, but as dead.”29 She would like to believe that by exiting the Beldam’s web she can exit the system, but the film suggests incorporation is not so easy to evade.

Coraline cannot escape the taint of incorporation because the Beldam’s desire to incorporate Coraline into her crypt exposes a political uncanny in stop-­motion animation as well. Derrida suggests that during incorporation, “the dead is taken into us but doesn’t become a part of us. It occupies a particular place in our body. It can speak on its own. It can haunt and ventriloquize our own proper body and our own proper speech.”30 His metaphor also describes the excessive material presence through which stop-­ motion becomes political—the way in which it materializes and excessively animates the social world that produced it. As Sianne Ngai has suggested, replacement animation enables past—but evidently not dead—stereotypes about the racialized body to erupt across its surfaces. Coraline toys with the trope of animatedness that Ngai unpacks and expands her theory of excessive animation to address the feminine and—by extension—the chora. Ngai pursues the political implications of excessive animation— which she calls animatedness—as “one of the most ‘basic’ ways in which affect becomes publicly visible in an age of mechanical reproducibility . . . a kind of innervated ‘agitation’ or ‘animatedness.’”31 Tracing animatedness through nineteenth- and twentieth-­century U.S. cultural production, Ngai borrows Rey Chow’s figure of the “postmodern automaton” to read stop-­

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motion as a metaphor for the mechanization of female and working-­class bodies under modernity.32 Chow contends that modern visual culture provides both the logic and the locus for contemporary regimes of difference and that “the visual as such, as a kind of dominant discourse of modernity, reveals epistemological problems that are inherent in . . . the very ways social difference—be it in terms of class, gender, or race—is constructed.”33 Specifically, Chow argues: “One of the chief sources of the oppression of women lies in the way they have been consigned to visuality . . . which modernism magnifies with the availability of technology such as cinema.”34 Ngai points out that different forms of visual production engender different modes of constructing the other and argues that stop-­motion “animation calls for new ways of understanding the technologization of the racialized body.”35 Thus while Chow attends to the spectacle of Charlie Chaplin’s performance of maladaption to Fordism in Modern Times (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1936), Ngai examines how the body becomes a technological object for the performance of race (or, one might argue, for the performance of maladaption to U.S. racism) in Fox’s stop-­motion sitcom, The PJs (1998–2001). Chronicling the misadventures of a disenfranchised public housing community in Detroit, The PJs requires its characters’ mouths to move very quickly to deliver its comedic dialogue, yet such rapid replacement animation leads to visible modular instability. As conversations progress, characters’ mouths become excessively mobile, even volatile, and for Ngai, this excessive animation suggests “an exaggerated responsiveness to the language of others that turns the subject into a spasmodic puppet.” Such unintended animation contributes to the show’s critique of racism, as “in its racialized form animatedness loses its generally positive associations with human spiritedness or vitality and comes to resemble a kind of mechanization.”36 Excessive animatedness thus elevates stop-­motion above the innocuousness of advertisements and children’s programming and emphasizes the genre’s commentary on the social body, on the body as a cog conditioned by the social machine. Ngai’s analysis of The PJs marks a significant break with previous ­analyses of stop-­motion animation, which tend to focus on its industrial history and its uncanny timelessness. Indeed, not only does Ngai call attention to the social and political implications of animation as a technology of vision, but she also suggests that the uncanniness of animation metonymizes the uncanniness of the subject under industrialized capital. In the twenty-­first century, this subject no longer produces wealth through labor but struggles with quandaries of consumption, representation, and virtual

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existence. Coraline exposes this production of difference through its representation of African American characters not present in Neil Gaiman’s original novel. These characters, Wyborn Lovat and his grandmother, own the Pink Palace where Coraline lives; in fact, the film hints that Ms. Lovat began fighting the Beldam long before Coraline arrived. Ms. Lovat only chimes in as an off-­screen voice for most of the film, but when she finally does appear, her skin color and accessories make race retroactively visible in the film. Indeed, Ms. Lovat marks Wyborn as African American for audience members who may not previously have acknowledged him as such. For although Wyborn is the only brown character throughout most of the film, another is blue-­skinned, and others have blue hair, so his brown skin and brown mop-­top may not suggest blackness to a viewer not accustomed to recognizing race in animation. With the arrival of Ms. Lovat, however, the race that was always implicit in Wyborn’s excessive animation becomes visible. Not only does Ms. Lovat look darker than Wyborn, she also physiologically resembles a PJs character. She even wears a gardenia in her hair, an homage to both Billie Holiday and Hattie McDaniel, who wore the flower while accepting her 1939 Academy Award for best supporting actress. For the spectator who has been looking for it, however, race has always been visible in Coraline, politicizing its animation from the opening scenes of the movie. Its first shot depicts an African American doll floating down through an open window to be grasped by the Beldam’s needle fingers. These hands then begin disassembling the doll’s clothes and features, removing form from matter, before exposing the hegemonic whiteness of U.S. film by reconstituting the doll as Caucasian (and specifically as Coraline). This (de)materialization sequence is crucial for the film’s artistic and political projects because it binds the production and obfuscation of race in Coraline to its new 3-­D aesthetic. The scene works on the doll—and the viewer—with both classic 3-­D projectiles (in this case a needle poking up through the doll’s button eye and waving toward the viewer) and deep-­focus shots of the doll descending into and floating out of an open window. These virtual expansions of screen space inaugurate a new approach to 3-­D visuality, one in which the screen becomes a receptacle for the nebulous materialization of the image. Because this prologue reinscribes screen space as receptacle during a scene of feminine production, it fosters a political association between chora, race, and materiality in animation that frames the film’s depiction of its central African American character, Wybie. Wyborn first arrives in Coraline dressed as a “spook”; outfitted to resemble a ghost, in a black fireman’s coat and a welder’s mask painted to

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resemble a skull, he appears on top of a cliff, rearing up on his bicycle as lightning crashes and Coraline gasps. Once she recovers from her fright, Coraline immediately begins undermining—or unpacking—Wyborn’s name; she ignores his preferred nickname, Wybie, and calls him “Why-­ were-­you-­born” instead. As cunning as this sobriquet might sound, it obscures the degree to which the film uses race to signal ontological uncertainty. For Wyborn is not only an annoyingly animate little boy; he is also excessively tied to the film’s representation of its own animation process. Wyborn unwittingly brings the Beldam’s doll to Coraline, and his gift reminds the spectator that Coraline is herself a doll while also naturalizing her dollhood by comparison. Wybie later becomes the model against which Coraline’s animatedness develops, where animatedness is defined (by Ngai) as “threatening one’s own limits (or the roles in which one is captured and defined) not by transcending these limits from above but by inventing new ways of inhabiting them.”37 In the Other World, the Beldam produces an Other Wyborn to guide Coraline through her cinema of attractions; however, this Wybie’s mouth is sewn into an exaggerated rictus that emphasizes the horror of being animated (as opposed to being animate). Thus Wybie’s name and his epistemological role in the film indicate his centrality for understanding the greater visual and material crisis in Coraline. Wybie brings out the animatedness in Coraline and in Coraline; his character produces the connection between Selick’s film and Ngai’s affect theory that ultimately unveils the contemporary stakes of the chora for digital mediation. That is, Wybie’s politicized embodiment helps the spectator understand Coraline’s architecture as a film and its commentary on contemporary theories of gendered architecture and materialized form. Coraline draws its viewer into the experience of scenic space and narratively thematizes that experience, and by attending to that intersection, we can better understand RealD’s success. Coraline reminds its viewer that embodied experiences of vision and animatedness do not come without social conditioning. It reproduces the lived experience of biocular vision as virtual and phantasmatic, and in so doing, it allows the spectator to acknowledge that such embodied participation in vision is necessarily uncanny. Simultaneously, it proffers the chora as the guiding structure of a paradoxical desire for incorporated spectacle and incorporation into spectacle. The film thus enables viewers to experience the desire for RealD as an extension of an existing trope for the deep interweaving of gender and representation that persists into the digital. Moreover, Coraline’s return to the chora can direct us toward a new

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theory for the uncanniness of digital spectatorship and a new investment to replace many viewers’ loss of faith in the photographic index.

Coraline negotiates the relationship of form to matter regardless of the platform on which one sees it, but its significance for spectatorial investment in digital cinema is most pronounced when the film is exhibited in RealD. Through Coraline, the RealD viewer receives a visual exercise in the relationship of image to matter for digital cinema, providing metaphors for those concerns through its narrative and its excessively digital and excessively material production techniques. Thus the film’s figural and dramatic chora invites the spectator to reconsider the crisis facing cinematic indexicality. Since the early 1980s, media critics have questioned how digital image capture, processing, and exhibition—and their allegedly “infinite capacity” to manipulate an image—would affect the truth-­value of photochemical photography. Their ruminations demonstrate that digital imagery has undermined the spectator’s historical faith in the photograph as indexical record. As Philip Rosen explains, photographic indexicality—“minimally defined as including some element of physical contact between referent and sign”— set the standard of historiographic probity from roughly the 1830s through the 1980s, but lately its credibility has come unmoored.38 Rosen points out that digital image production and exhibition do not necessarily carry their viewer any farther from the profilmic referent than analog transcription, but they may make the image’s capacity for duplicity more visible. Popular U.S. film genres have also shown a marked predilection for “digital mimicry,” exploiting CGI’s capacity for hyperrealism in blockbusters like Independence Day (dir. Roland Emmerich, 1996), Spider-­Man (dir. Sam Raimi, 2001), and Transformers (dir. Michael Bay, 2007).39 These films use digital image production to bolster photorealism, and thus indexicality, as a cinematic norm or standard, even as indexicality also stands as the limit they must overcome. Moreover, the very crispness and “perfection” of computer graphics induce digital skepticism that prevents many spectators from psychically investing in digital projection. As Sobchack so eloquently explains, the cold perfection—the “deathlife”—of computer animation fails to provide its viewers with any substitute for or diversion from the loss of the impossible fantasy of indexicality.40 Coraline incorporates this “deathlife”—or digital uncanny—into its third dimension; it constructs the 3-­D screen as receptacle for a new experi-

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ence of form and matter. That is, it exploits the instability of the index while experimenting with the chora as a potentially more useful metaphor for the relationship of image to matter for this platform. Recall that Coraline was made with digital stop-­motion, digital illustrations that produced plasticine models that later became digital photographs. The film’s whole technique is premised on the uncanniness of the cinema’s precarious relationship to indexicality, but it also creates an image that can reassure the viewer that there is a referent for RealD’s uncanny screen depth. At root, the trouble with RealD—like two-­dimensional digital imagery before it—is its uncanny loss of indexicality: how can a film reproduce the viewer’s faith in a verisimilar image famously devoid of film’s characteristic indexical trace? Stereoscopic visual technologies aim to produce a more material experience of vision than their two-­dimensional counterparts, but RealD’s digital projection does so—and does so more successfully—by (further) cleaving the image from material, profilmic referents. Lev Manovich, D. N. Rodowick, and others have already demonstrated that the digital photograph is neither more nor less indexical than the chemical photograph, but Coraline precipitates a new theory of digital spectatorship based on the historically unstable relationship of form to matter. In Coraline, the chora returns to replace the index as the dominant metaphor for the relationship of image to matter in cinema. It does so through RealD’s illusory spaces and its stop-­motion dolls’ uncanny physicality. By mimicking materiality on-­screen, Coraline provides the spectator with a locus—a stain, if you will—in which to locate her anxieties about visuality and material existence. Even if the juggernaut of Hollywood studio marketing succeeds in overshadowing Coraline and relegating it to the footnotes of future histories of digital stereoscopy, this minor independent production nonetheless constitutes a pivotal moment in the history of digital projection, an important metacinematic contemplation of the pleasure of postindexical spectatorship. The film not only positions its new exhibition platform in relationship to previous cinematic innovations like deep focus, it also enables us to see digital cinema through older philosophical inquiries into the relationship of image to matter. Moreover, the political overtones of its production medium should remind the spectator that “the production of the West’s ‘others’ depends on a logic of visuality that bifurcates ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ into the incompatible positions of intellectuality and spectacularity”—or in the case of the chora, into incompatible categories of intelligibility and femininity.41 Coraline allows us to screen the problematic tropes governing

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Western metaphysics of visuality; it reminds us that these issues condition our relationship to the image just as much as the RealD spectacles perched in front of our eyes. Like the Beldam, we have filled our virtual receptacles with ghosts who whisper: the pleasures of new media are built on ancient regimes of power and visuality. Notes I wish to thank Seth Perlow for his invaluable assistance and Ellis Hanson for inspiring and organizing this special issue. 1 In addition to being nominated for a People’s Choice Award for Best Animated 3-­D movie of 2009 and winning the 2009 award for Best Animated Stereography from the International 3-­D Society, Coraline received superlative critical reviews. Roger Ebert is among the most staid in suggesting that “the ideal audience for this film would be admirers of film art itself,” while Jennie Punter of Canada’s Globe and Mail deems it “quite possibly the best 3-­D movie ever made,” and the Daily Mail ’s Paul Connelly argues that “Coraline, almost certainly the best 3D movie ever made, should be an object lesson for 3D movie-­makers.” Roger Ebert, review of Coraline, Chicago Sun-­Times, February 4, 2009, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ article?AID=/20090204/REVIEWS/902049989/1023; Jennie Punter, “Taking 3-­D to an Eye-­Popping New Level,” review of Coraline, Globe and Mail, February 5, 2009, www .theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/article969978.ece; and Paul Connelly, “3-­D Cinema Was the Big Idea that Never Took Off,” Daily Mail, September 12, 2009, www.daily mail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-­1212863/3D-­cinema-­big-­idea-­took--digital-­technology-­ better-­specs-­finally-­leap-­grab-­us.html. “Avatar,” Box Office Mojo, www.boxofficemojo .com/movies/?id=avatar.htm (accessed May 28, 2010). 2 Henry Selick, interview by Sheila Johnston, “Coraline: Animation by Neil Gaiman,” Telegraph, May 14, 2009, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/5307595/ Coraline-­animation-­by-­Neil-­Gaiman.html. 3 Recent industrial analyses suggest movies exhibited in 3-­D make three times as much per screen as their two-­dimensional versions, which explains why distributors and theater owners have embraced RealD projection. See, for example, Frank Rose, “Beowulf and Angelina Jolie Give 3–D a Second Chance in Hollywood,” Wired, October 23, 2007, www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15–11/ff_3dhollywood. 4 Vivian Sobchack, “Final Fantasies: Computer Graphic Animation and the [Dis]Illusion of Life,” in Animated Worlds, ed. Suzanne Buchan, David Surman, and Paul Ward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 172. 5 Coraline thus resolves the shortcomings of digital animation that Sobchack identifies in her case study of the early digital feature Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (dir. Hironobu Sakaguchi and Motonori Sakakibara, 2001), which she argues failed (both critically and financially) because it removed the indexical trace of hand-­drawn cell animation without providing an alternative locus for the uncanniness of cinemagraphic motion (ibid.). 6 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14, ed. Albert Dickson and James Strachey, trans. James Strachey (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 363–64.

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Elizabeth Grosz, “Woman, Chora, Dwelling,” in Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 9. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as “Woman, Chora, Dwelling.” Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 89–125. Ray Harryhausen quoted in Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship (New York: Wallflower, 2002), 97. Richard Verrier, “3D Technology Firm RealD Has Starring Role at Movie Theaters,” Los Angeles Times, March 26, 2009, articles.latimes.com/2009/mar/26/business/ fi-­cotown-­reald26. Matt Cowan, “3D Glossary,” RealD—The New 3D, February 1, 2008, www.reald.com/ content/3d-­glossary.aspx (this site no longer works). This sequence is bawdy, but just bawdy enough, because Coraline cannot afford either a G or a PG-­13 rating. While analyzing the corporate deal that would bring RealD to Regal, Cinemark, and AMC theaters across the United States by 2009, Variety columnist Pamela McClintock cites a recent study by Nielsen Company that discovered that “family-­friendly, PG-­rated films without profanity generated the best box office results.” McClintock’s article ties PG ratings to RealD as the financial future of the studio system; indeed, eight of the top ten RealD movies have been rated PG or PG-­13. Pamela McClintock, “Studios, Theaters Near Digital Pact,” Variety, March 10, 2008, www .variety.com/article/VR1117982175.html?categoryid=2502&cs=1. See also “Genres: 3D: 1980–Present,” Box Office Mojo, http://boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=3d.htm (accessed May 28, 2010). Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1990). Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Barbara Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xvii. Ibid., xiv. Barbara Creed offers perhaps the most cogent analysis of femininity, Freudian incorporation, and maternal monstrosity in The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), wherein she points out that many cultural narratives about subject formation hinge on the defeat of a mother’s consuming desire. Rose, “Beowulf and Angelina Jolie.” John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 99. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 27d. Hereafter cited parenthetically by paragraph number. Timaeus goes on to explain that this space “only ever acts as the receptacle for everything, and it never comes to resemble in any way whatsoever any of the things that enter it” (ibid., 50c). Ibid., 50b, 51a–c. Ibid., 52d. Jacques Derrida, “Khōra,” in The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 231. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as “Khōra.” When referring to Derrida’s theory of khōra, I avoid using an article and defer to his spelling. Elsewhere, I refer to the chora to indicate my engagement with more recent feminist interventions into his analysis.

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Julia Kristeva, “The Semiotic and the Symbolic,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver, trans. Margaret Weller (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 37. Ibid. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 37. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 179. Oxford Eng­lish Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989, s.v. “beldam.” Alan Cholodenko, “The Spectre in the Screen,” Animation Studies 2 (2008): 47. Derrida, quoted in Alan Cholodenko, “The Crypt, the Haunted House of Cinema,” Cultural Studies Review 10.2 (2004): 101; and Jacques Derrida, “Fors,” xxi. Derrida, quoted in Cholodenko, “The Crypt,” 101. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 31. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 55. Ibid. Ibid., 59–60. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 125. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 124. Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 302. Shilo T. McClean, Digital Storytelling: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2008). Sobchack, “Final Fantasies,” 180. Chow, Writing Diaspora, 60.

Michele White Dirty Brides and Internet Settings: The Affective Pleasures and Troubles with Trash the Dress Photography Sessions

Introduction

A search through photography bins at antique

markets or the photography category on eBay reveals numerous nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century images of weddings. In the most common of these representations, women in white wedding gowns pose next to male partners. Their stiff upright stances and seemingly coherent bodies, with women in white paralleled and counterpointed by men in dark suits, are barely undone by people leaning in, sitting down, and standing with great sweeps of trains and veils. Many contemporary wedding photographers have adopted the less posed features of photojournalism, but a form of this visual coupling continues. The repetitive aspects of these wedding images and their continuance over time highlight photographic conventions and wide-­scale investments in heterosexuality and monogamy. There are also more dissonant wedding images that begin to undermine cultural assertions of dyadic gender, heteronormativity, whiteness, cleanliness, and bodily coherence. Some trash the dress (TTD) pictures of women wearing

The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:3, Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-1275824 © 2011 Duke University Press

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Figure 1. Lynette Seelmeyer, “True Blood,” Rock n’ Roll Bride, December 4, 2009, www.rocknrollbride.com/2009/12/true-­blood/

wedding dresses again work against these normative cultural conventions. For instance, Hayley conventionally displays her engagement and wedding rings in a TTD image, but her slightly chipped red nails and fingers are streaked with blood. It appears as if she has clawed and hurt someone (see figure 1). Her hand and a dead leaf are in a pool of this dark and viscous fluid. In further images, Hayley’s breasts heave and sag in the otherwise body-­shaping bodice, and blood stains the front of the gown. She looks out at the viewer and gestures violently with a knife.1 Hayley’s husband and the accompanying indications of heterosexual coupling are banished from— are even dead to—these images. These representations thereby connect weddings to women without men, female rage, blood, fluidity, and death. Photographers work with married women during TTD post-­wedding sessions and document them wearing white wedding dresses while strolling in fields, posing in front of decrepit buildings, jumping into swamps, and smearing dirt on their bodies and dresses. TTD sessions are related to and contradict some of the key aspects of contemporary Western heterosexual wedding cultures, which tend to perpetuate normative femininity and sexuality, women’s visual accessibility, and women’s clean and mannered

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bodies. In the Internet wedding forums and blogs where these experiences are discussed and considered, heterosexual women detail extreme forms of pleasure in getting married, wearing elaborate fitted white gowns, and being photographed. They also indicate the failures of dresses and undergarments, flubbed ceremonies, unsatisfactory receptions, poorly executed wedding photographs that do not convey their self-­conceptions, and reasons for doing a TTD session. Male partners sometimes participate in TTD practices, while married lesbians and women who are having commitment ceremonies with women almost never take part.2 However, women erotically engage with other women in wedding forums by complimenting their physiognomy, encouraging them to produce and post sensual images, and indicating their sexual attraction to specific women. In this essay, I focus on women’s TTD practices that exceed the functions of traditional wedding cultures and the normalizing and ordering tendencies of wedding photographs and Internet sites. I consider, for example, how the lesbian looks that are scripted into women’s fashion magazines are extended in Internet wedding forums, where women pleasurably gaze at erotic images of other women and compliment the women who post. Participants thereby constitute a women-­focused setting and an expanding archive of same-­sex admiration and desire. TTD sessions and the posting of these images on Internet sites reconceptualize the gaze because women are looking at other women, rather than performing as objects for privileged white heterosexual male viewers. Zombie performances and gazes appear in some sessions, threaten to feed off viewers, and further disorder empowered masculinity and other active viewers. Disgusting fluids and filthy bodies, which women incorporate by presenting as zombies or moving through mud, may encourage viewers to look briefly, but they are difficult to gaze at. These images shift viewers from looking to a kind of tactile feeling, including imagining how emotionally painful it is to get dresses dirty; thinking about open and broken bodies; and remembering the sticky, erotic, and disturbing aspects of being wet and filthy. I argue that women’s delighted TTD engagements with images, other women, and dirt trouble the bounded body, problematize the ways lens-­based media has enabled men to look at women, and offer women a form of pleasure and desire that is not so easily correlated with white weddings and pretty brides. Sometimes, TTD also defiles women by suggesting women are adverse to getting filthy but are forced to trash their dresses anyway, and connecting filth to disempowerment.3

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Trash the Dress Wedding photographer John Michael Cooper introduced TTD in 2006 in a blog post. Cooper articulates his oppositional position and describes meetings with wedding clients as opportunities to “show off what you are best at,” which in his case includes “portraits down on the ground, in the dirt, mud, grass, trees, water, whatever,” because he loves “to trash the dress.” Cooper also portrays women negatively and distinguishes between his “risky” photography and women’s initial refusal to get their dresses dirty.4 Photographer Mark Eric read Cooper’s post, worked with the bride Shana Strawcutter on a TTD session, registered trashthedress.com, uploaded images from their session, and turned trashthedress.wordpress.com and then trashthedress.com into popular promotional venues for photographers’ TTD pictures.5 During 2007, reporters began covering TTD, and many wedding photographers offered sessions in such countries as the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. Photographers use TTD as a means of distinguishing their practices since wedding photography is often associated with the banal, conventional, and low. They also sell more expensive photography packages because wedding-­day photography has been extended to include boudoir pictures, engagement sittings, and TTD sessions.6 Participants, photographers, and reporters identify TTD sessions as a means for women to oppose wedding norms and being mannered. Reporters variously describe TTD as an “anti-­wedding” trend where brides “get down and dirty with their bad selves” and “a new kind of liberating bridal tradition.”7 Women chronicle their TTD activities in blogs and wedding forums and indicate that they participate because it is fun, allows them to escape wedding conventions, frees them from mandates to keep dresses clean, and provides better images. The claims from participants, photographers, and reporters that TTD always transforms wedding photography and women’s experiences are in need of critique. TTD is often reliant on traditional conceptions of femininity, and photographers promote and manage TTD’s oppositional functions to assert their position. However, the women who engage with these practices and excessively stain gowns adopt positions that are culturally marked as too fluid and in which women are ordinarily trying to control themselves.

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Wedding Cultures TTD sessions suggest some of the reasons for people to resist weddings, wedding dresses, and the industry that helps produce and perpetuate wedding cultures, while also extending wedding rituals. The average cost of a wedding in the United States is $27,800 (though it was lower in 2009, at $19,581), in Australia is $49,202, with a honeymoon, and in the United Kingdom is £21,089.8 As these numbers convey, weddings are noteworthy rites of consumption that shape society in many ways.9 They connect personal relationships to intense lifelong consumerism and assert and naturalize heterosexuality, binary gender, and traditional family values. Ramona Faith Oswald questions how heterosexual weddings “link the personal decision to marry with an institutional heterosexual privilege carrying profound social, legal, financial, and religious benefits.”10 These advantages, and the associated identity positions, do not equally empower heterosexual men and women. It is generally believed that there have been significant positive changes in Western women’s roles since the second wave of the women’s movement. Society continues to valorize, however, as Stevi Jackson indicates, “traditional gender arrangements and lifelong monogamy.”11 Sherril Horowitz Schuster argues that the increase in bridal magazines (and now Web sites), consumer shows, and wedding-­themed films and advertising perpetuate traditional bridal rituals, suggesting that these cultures are valuable and pertinent.12 These texts are directed at women and tend to assert that weddings are the most important events in women’s lives rather than portraying them as an important occasion for the couple, family, and social network and presenting weddings as one of many life occurrences. Wedding texts and rituals instruct women in feminine roles. Wedding photographs train women on how to enact the roles of bride and wife. Charles Lewis’s research on wedding photography points to the ways such images “are nearly always constructing the conventional.”13 Feminine beauty, grace, delicateness, and slimness are constructed and perpetuated through wedding photographs. This is supported by wedding photographers who have “developed strategies to manage their subjects’ presentations of their weight, with camera angles, lighting, and posing used to create stylized pictures that portray the weights of people at weddings in socially desirable ways.”14 Personal and family remembrances of weddings, which are aided by photographic “documentation” of women’s bodies, include recollections of the bride’s weight. Brides are thereby patrolled, objectified,

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and produced as normalized and acceptable bodies. TTD sessions quote these conceptions of women’s physiognomy and comportment, use them to assert their difference, and sometimes trouble traditional Western wedding cultures and social prescriptions about identity and desire. Viewing Pleasures and Positions TTD photographers claim that their practices facilitate artistic freedom, but these sessions have a number of things in common with wedding, photographic, and social conventions. Many women in TTD sessions pose prettily and mostly cleanly against gritty backgrounds, smile for the camera, look moodily and erotically out at viewers, stand to best display small waists, and tip back to receive kisses. In a Denise Neufeld image, a woman reclines on a grimy broken piano and looks dreamily into the distance in some version of erotic satisfaction (see figure 2). She is positioned to show off her breasts and slender waist and lit to emphasize her whiteness and difference from the dusty ground.15 TTD images of couples erotically rolling in the surf, with the woman reclining and accepting her male partner’s attention, reproduce aspects of representational art in which women are prone or otherwise rendered as passive.16 Such TTD sessions, like traditional wedding photographs, work to constitute women as visually available objects and conventionally attractive and slender bodies. This makes theories of looking and gazing, including considerations of how sexuality and desire are related to viewing positions, useful ways of thinking about TTD. There is a wealth of feminist scholarship that considers how the gaze, which can be defined as a form of power-­laden staring, renders and enforces gendered spectatorial positions. These theorists began by showing how viewing influences and enables individuals, especially heterosexual men. Laura Mulvey’s study of classic Hollywood film indicates how the subject of the gaze is male, and his empowered position is supported by the camera’s viewpoint, while its object is female, and she exists to be viewed: “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-­be-­looked-­at-­ness.”17 A number of scholars, including Mulvey, continue to reconsider early feminist film theories that describe the gaze as a totalizing and purely patriarchal structure. For instance, Chris Straayer reflects on E. Ann Kaplan and other feminists’ psychoanalytically informed considerations of the male gaze and

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Figure 2. Denise Neufeld, “Salton Sea—more amazing Brides (and photography),” Trash the Dress! January 25, 2008, http://trashthedress.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/ salton-­sea-­more-­amazing-­brides-­and-­photography/

argues that these theories need “to be combined with the equally pertinent question ‘Is the gaze heterosexual?’”18 TTD photographers often work with participants to constitute brides as erotic and visible heterosexual bodies. However, the wedding forums where many of these images appear address women. An illustration of a woman in a wedding dress and veil on the opening parts of Weddingbee stands in for readers and codes participants as women. Members often employ the titles “Miss” or “Mrs.” as part of their user names and articulate their gender and relationship status. The Project Wedding site uses a woman’s diamond engagement ring as the o in Project and URL bar icon. Project Wedding further indicates the gender of members by featuring dresses but not tuxedos. According to the “About Us” part of the site, Project Wedding connects “brides across the nation.” Easy Weddings codes the setting as feminine through the use of a bright pink background with a blowing veil; pink, raspberry, and turquoise links; and mention of “Wedding Dresses” in the browser title. Even when featured images include grooms or wedding parties, the titles focus on women by noting such things as

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“Real Weddings. Real Brides. See how other brides have made their wedding day perfect.”19 These settings render women as subjects and objects. Thus, these sites support female, rather than male, forms of looking and evaluative gazing. Women’s wedding forums offer many of the same erotic characteristics as fashion magazines. TTD images, with their strong shapes, active compositions, and moody poses, also refer to fashion photography. Diana Fuss points to the ways women’s fashion photography and its related market, like the cinema and its structures, appear to produce and maintain female subjects who yearn to be desired by men. While women’s fashion photography “poses its models as sexually irresistible subjects, inviting its female viewers to consume the product by (over)identifying with the image,” it also presents erotic representations of female bodies that are designed to be appreciated and consumed by women.20 Thus, Fuss argues, the fashion industry is one of the few sites where women are encouraged to look passionately at other women. Annamari Vänskä asserts that fashion magazines also “tutor adolescent girls and young women to consume the female body and appearance through gazing.”21 This may be understood as a process of passively identifying with women, who are the object of the active and empowered male gaze. However, Reina Lewis and Katrina Rolley argue that “it is difficult, if not impossible, fully to separate admiration from desiring to be and from desiring to have.”22 Women are also taught to desire women. Fuss indicates that fashion magazines render heterosexual norms along with lesbian viewing positions and that these traditional sexualities limit the more radical potential of these texts. She also argues that to “look straight at women, it appears, straight women must look as lesbians.”23 These magazines, according to Lewis and Rolley, “educate” the “reader into something very close to a lesbian response” and gaze.24 Internet wedding forums extend the lesbian looks scripted in fashion magazines by providing a proliferating archive of same-­sex admiration and desire. Women pleasurably view and comment on photography sessions, dresses, and women’s bodies. They identify with representations and specific women when imagining wearing other women’s dresses and being the subject of posted images, therefore functioning as objects of the gaze. They also actively admire and express desire for the associated women, supporting their own and other people’s appeal. Responding to an image of a woman in a paint-­splattered dress, jilliibabii figures a form of what Lewis and Rolley refer to as a “lesbian response”—the admiration and desire of all women for other women and the related political implications—by includ-

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ing the affective “Drool” in her post, signaling her lust for the subject, and noting that the image is her “fave.”25 Many wedding forum participants position themselves as engaged viewers of other women and erotica collectors by searching for, gathering, storing, and posting pictures of women in TTD sessions. cld606 “found a couple of sexy pictures. Wanted to share with you girls” and asks, “Do you have any?” m.h.1.23 encourages collectors and posters when identifying these representations as “hot pics!” TTD is Sarahinwonderland’s “favorite type of photography so” she has “hundreds more.”26 These women pleasurably view TTD images in forum threads and identify them as “inspiration” for future sessions. The women who participate in TTD picture exchanges encourage the continuance and expansion of lesbian spectatorial positions, which all viewers must to some extent occupy, by asking other readers to collect, post, and admire compilations. This sort of collecting and desire-­ expanding Internet trade is an aspect of digitally facilitated, and sometimes triggered, eroticism and longing that also occur with other kinds of image sharing, including fan forum icon displays, porn trading, and the gay men who search for, save, and share images of eBay underwear and swimwear sellers’ visible penis lines.27 TTD is also remediated, and different bodies objectified, when sessions of couples getting wet are erotically incorporated into sites that feature “men in and under the water fully clothed.”28 Wedding forum participants amplify the collaborative lesbian gazes and responses that occur when women read magazines together and post favorite images on office and bedroom walls. Women’s comments about female TTD participants are supported, repeated, and expanded by other members. In addition, wedding forums offer women opportunities to engage directly with depicted women. These women structure and ask for lesbian responses when posting their TTD depictions and expecting other women to look at and appreciate them. While the men in images are sometimes mentioned, it is women’s attractiveness that is of interest. Women receive such appreciative comments as “How stunning are you!!” “i can’t get over how stunning you are!!” and “you are sooo gorgeous.” Women also persuade other women to participate in TTD sessions and fulfill their erotic fantasies. For instance, MommyLynda would “love to see” heartssetfreebylove “all rolled up in paint” because she looks “outstanding in that dress.” heartssetfreebylove responds, and MommyLynda continues that her “photos would be soooooo sexy if that $25 dress got wet!!! With your ta tas???OmG!”29 Similar remarks about women’s breasts and other features appear in discussions about engagement sessions, boudoir pictures,

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wedding dresses, and wedding photographs. They extend lesbian responses and same-­sex desires through the varied stages and representations of weddings. Contemporary culture often suggests that heterosexual men and their desires animate women’s fashion magazines even though they are absent from the imagery and not expected to view the materials. Men are presumed to have a central position in the lives of women readers, and as Lewis argues, “it is for ‘his’ eyes that” magazine consumers “study the arts of beauty and dress.”30 Women’s attention to men’s desires would seem to be expanded in wedding forums. After all, heterosexual weddings legally and ideologically pair women with men. While men are referenced in the forums, delighted and engaged women ordinarily look at, admire, and comment on women. Heterosexual weddings are in some way the subject and intended outcome of the forums, but there is rarely any indication in TTD narratives that this culture is produced for or directed at men. In fact, many women indicate fiancés’ and husbands’ disinterest in dresses and TTD sessions. The roles articulated and images produced during TTD sessions often figure homosocial, if not homoerotic, spheres, where brides and bridesmaids are distinguished from grooms and groomsmen. These wedding arrangements and gendered spheres, according to Elizabeth Freeman, “proliferate connections between people that would be illicit if they were to become sexual.”31 There are identificatory and erotic implications, according to Fuss, of depicting pairs of women. TTD sessions continue and expand these homosocial couplings. Photographers organize “trash bashes” and post images in which many women engage with each other and model their wedding dresses. When Chou Chou and her “wonderful” female “friend” learned their “hubbies weren’t keen” on a TTD session, they “thought ‘Bugger them!’ and did it together.” They share the URL for the photographer’s images and are assured that they have “beautiful pics, what a great idea to do it with a friend.” Like the lesbian gazes and responses triggered by other threads, women also note, you “look seriously stunning!” Their depictions encourage further women’s spheres and couplings. For instance, darkwing really likes “the look of two brides having fun” and wonders whom she can “convince to do this with” her. The mirroring poses of Chou Chou and her friend and viewers’ comments unite them.32 A legal and sexual union with each other, rather than with their husbands, is suggested when they stand on either side of a church door, with the path between them, and are about to walk down the aisle together. These TTD images are capped by a flash sequence of heterosexual couples

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at their weddings. The layout suggests that arrangements between women hold up, constitute, and are controlled by heterosexuality. Looking and Looking Away Some TTD sessions include or even quote aspects of the horror genre, including zombie movies and television programs, and can therefore be considered critically through feminist literature on horror. Sessions and forum posts facilitate bodily sensations that are related to horror viewing, including calm/shivering, pleasure/pain, and looking/looking away, when women are visually and conceptually confronted by the idea of their wedding dresses being ruined. A basic aspect of horror is being “caught by surprise.” Characters in horror films, particularly women, and viewers have their “vision assaulted” by things they do not wish to observe. Viewers shut or cover their eyes as a means of protecting themselves from “taboo images” and “the literally painful ‘visuals’ that can accompany them.”33 Isabel Cristina Pinedo considers this issue and how spectators shift among not completely seeing, recoiling, and fully viewing/comprehending as part of the fluid pleasures of horror.34 Viewers’ relationships to bodies within the text are equally mutable. At times, monsters are horrific versions of women’s bodies. Women look at monsters and recognize, according to Linda Williams’s theorization of gendered horror viewing, that women can also threaten men’s power.35 Viewers and victims’ bodies are thus ruptured and at risk, and the empowered male gaze is compromised. Some women understand TTD sessions as monstrous and assaultive viewing. They are surprised by images, identify with the women in sessions, and express horror at the ways TTD reflects on their dresses and positions. Like the shivers and phantom pains that can accompany horror spectatorship and connect viewing to feeling, their examination and conceptualization of TTD creates a series of corporeal sensations that affect their bodies. In a Weddingbee forum poll, most women indicate they will not trash dresses. veganglam declares, “Nononononono” because her dress is her “baby.” ginantonic responds, “It seems like it would just be painful!” In the NYCWeddings forum, ant n tilde expresses her appreciation of the “gorgeous pictures,” but “seeing them made” her “belly hurt” and she cannot imagine doing a TTD session. For photographer Nicola Hyde, “the thought of deliberately ripping” her dress makes her “shudder,” and when she hears the “term Trash The Dress” she gets “a little squeamish.”36 She proposes changing the ways the trend is described, and to some

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extent enacted, to avoid these embodied responses. Literally and conceptually looking away is a powerful and controlling strategy for these women because they identify with the clean and proper body and TTD sessions pose their bodies as filthy and fluid and thereby open and in pieces. But turning away emphasizes rather than displaces the visceral aspects of TTD viewing and the varied ways women incorporate and are close to images. In these cases, viewing is not a distancing and mastering process.37 The women who oppose and dismiss TTD sessions are important to the coding of this form. They underscore the visual and affective potency of sessions by responding. Their evocations of shivering and embodied pain are a testament to the power of TTD images. They mark the women who do TTD sessions as cultural resisters and courageous explorers, moving through unfamiliar spaces and dealing with confining garb. Thus, women’s beliefs about the value of their dresses and surprised responses are necessary for TTD to persist as unexpected, as divergent from wedding rituals, and as a kind of cultural critique. They also associate TTD with women’s cultures, desires, and embodied sensations rather than figuring it solely as a representational strategy and women as objects. Photographers are reliant on these women, rather than only controlling and portraying them, to establish the difference between their TTD practices and wedding conventions. TTD sessions, as I have begun to suggest, emphasize the affective aspects of viewing. TTD mines and elaborates on wedding conventions and women’s fears about dirtying dresses. In horror, characters’ (and sometimes viewers’) related emotions include “crying, cowering, screaming, fainting,” and “trembling.”38 Euphoric sensations occur when characters fight back, foil monsters, escape from dangerous places, and survive. Viewers shriek, cheer, and move around in their seats as such actions unfold. In a similar manner, florazul elatedly responds to a TTD image of a bride on a tree branch and comments, “OO OO!!! Up in a treee!!!! (jumping up and down and pointing).”39 TTD has a visceral influence on women and the ways they constitute their bodies and desires. Abject terror and excitement, including the tactile experiences enacted by viewers of TTD sessions, are gendered as female and feminine. However, these feelings cannot fully relate female TTD participants to traditional roles and bodies. By acting out sensations and lesbian responses, women challenge the staid aspects of dresses and their role in heterosexual rituals. Their visceral expressions create maps of women’s bodies, desires, and critical processes rather than

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continuing cyberpunk and futurist narratives about disembodied Internet engagements, which associate new technologies with the mind and men.40 The Promises of Dirt TTD photographers deploy dirt, the unconventional, and resistance since purity, appropriateness, and control are associated with weddings. The term trash the dress allows photographers to evacuate the demure aspects of wedding dresses and associated images. At the same time, most TTD photographers want to prevent women from feeling that their weddings, wedding dresses, and TTD sessions are garbage. The word trash designates what needs to be cast out culturally, which in this case includes wedding photography but can also trouble weddings and marriages. TTD can problematize wedding cultures since dirt “signals a site of possible danger to social and individual systems,” according to Elizabeth Grosz, “a site of vulnerability.”41 Due to these connotations, many photographers use blogs and other methods to supervise cultural conceptions of TTD, particularly the forms of dirt and resistance that get coupled to the practice. For instance, Stone Ridge Photographers assures women that it “isn’t interested in destroying anyone’s dress.” There “may only be a tiny bit of dirt (similar to after the reception) on the hem which a dry cleaner can get out,” writes photographer Stacy Able, and if “a bride is sentimental about archiving the gown, steps can be taken” to “minimize wear/dirt on the gown.” Eric describes how TTD is mistakenly “portrayed as an act of rebellion.”42 Members of the Trash the Dress site use “the tagline ‘It’s about creation, not destruction’ to help counter any negativity that the photographers and brides involved may encounter.” These photographers claim that TTD does not challenge social codes or products, but some women work with professional photographers and family picture takers to permanently soil dresses and embrace fluid and excremental images. In Julianne’s session, she appears in white, purses her lips, and directs a lover’s kiss toward the mud-­slathered shoe she holds. In another image, the top of the dress is white but the bottom is stained yellow brown. Her flesh is scarred and legs caked with mud (see figure 3).43 Under her soiled dress, the shape and texture of the muck is excremental. This is horror photography because women fear small amounts of dirt will taint their dresses, and Julianne appears to have been buried and unearthed. These depictions of repellent fluids and dirty bodies may

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Figure 3. Alyssa Andrew Photography, “Lehigh Valley & Philadelphia Region Wedding Photographer | Alyssa Andrew Photography,” May 19, 2010, www.alyssaandrew.com/ main.php#imagegalleries/-­%20galleries%20-­/Trash%20the%20dress/10

briefly attract viewers, but they also make women difficult to gaze at. During these instances of repulsed viewing, in the varied ways this term signifies, women are linked to the monster and the monstrous. Threatened by “the sight of the monstrous,” as Barbara Creed argues, “the viewing subject is put into crisis.” The borders that are designed to prevent bodily disgust and improper mixing “threaten to disintegrate, collapse.”44 Viewers thus understand the precariousness of their position as coherent bodies. Stomachs hurt and other pains erupt as horror texts and TTD sessions figure the inside rushing outside and clothing and bodies dissolving. Feminist considerations of abjection and fluid bodies offer critical models for considering how the TTD processes of getting wedding dresses wet and dirty disorder normative forms of femininity. Abjection, as Julia Kristeva notes, is caused by “what disturbs identity, system, order” and “does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-­between, the ambiguous, the composite.”45 The gaze can be abject or render others as abject, according to Karen Jacobs, because its violent construction often conceptually rents the individuals viewed; it facilitates an ambivalent regard; it situ-

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ates individuals too close to forbidden and polluted objects; and things that were previously unrepresentable and unseeable, but are now delivered by new technologies, generate fascination and horror.46 Abjection is an aspect of the gaze and is incorporated into the body as sensation. Such forms of abjection as food loathing and other boundary disruptions can trigger gagging and bodily spasms. For Kristeva, the heartbeat increases and “‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. . . . ‘I’ expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.”47 A group of individuals also shudder, look away, try to reject it, and end up abjecting themselves when thinking about TTD. Traditional Western wedding cultures encourage such sensations as the accelerated heartbeats of passion and love, sweating because of nervousness, and tingling with excitement, while constituting solid, autonomous, and heterosexual subjects. If the wedding dress can be seen as a kind of brace that works to form the woman’s body into a slender shape, directs her comportment, mandates a distance from dirt and body fluids, and normalizes her identity, then TTD references this clean and proper body and figures a lack of self-­containment. The clean and proper body, according to Grosz, is an “obedient, law-­abiding, social body” that emerges through its articulation and differentiation from abjection. It is developed through “the child’s negotiations with the demands of toilet training and the regulation of body fluids.”48 The accompanying rules and structures are perpetuated through self-­conceptions, social beliefs, rituals, and state laws. As if in opposition to this construction of the body and self, women in TTD sessions do such things as jump into swamps, get dirty, and temporarily embrace abjection. Female participants adopt fluidity and filth and align themselves with cultural conceptions of female bodies, while resisting the associated mandates to hide these states. Contemporary societies, as Grosz argues, negatively construct the female body “as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-­containment.”49 Such things as clothing, exercise, and surgery are used temporarily to solidify the indeterminacy, leakiness, and abjectness of the female body, its threat to structure. For instance, the tight and boned bodices of women’s wedding dresses form the fluid aspects of women’s breasts into more solid shapes. When Katie Monroe poses in her big white gown beside the ocean, the cohesion of her wedding dress–clad body begins to be undone.50 Although Monroe’s strapless bodice shapes her chest into a volume, water and sand seep into

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the skirt and make her body appear to be melting away and meshing with the saltwater foam. Her position as subject and object of the gaze begins to be incoherent. Women use narratives and gestures to convey their delight in enmeshing dresses and bodies in muck. In Juliana’s TTD session, mud covers her skirt. She conveys pleasure and freedom by doing a cartwheel on the muddy coast, with her legs splayed in the air and dress twisting around. Juliana links TTD to an overt sexuality when noting that she “had so much fun the first time around,” “just had to do it again,” and this time gets “really really dirty.” In making a heart shape while covered in dirt, Juliana connects filth and love. raspberry began her TTD session “by lying in the dirt, rolled down a hill that had patchy grass, tried to get dirty in a patch of red dirt,” “found a little patch of red mud,” and “wiped it all over” her dress. She provides images of “lying in the dirt” and her “filthy hem and feet” and announces that she “laughed so much” and “was FILTHY.” Breanne’s TTD session, with dirt bikes and quad bikes, has her energetically riding through and sprayed with muck until her whole dress becomes a wet, brown mass.51 In the final image, her white and containing gown is effaced by a casing of dried mud that confuses hair and pasture and skirt and rubble, and makes her a kind of compendium of the ground. TTD images and descriptions evoke such abject substances as blood, vomit, pus, and shit. These body fluids and their TTD enactments threaten the boundaries of the body and its whole and proper position because, as Grosz argues, they trace “the paths of entry or exit, the routes of interchange or traffic with the world.”52 At the beginning of Emily’s session, she leans cleanly and prettily in her wedding dress on a rocky streambank.53 However, her legs are awkwardly outstretched, knees pushed up near her torso, and dress just draped over her upper thigh so that she appears ready to tip back and reveal her crotch and buttocks. Emily also sits on a muddy bank and enters a pond. When leaving the water and viewed from the back, patches of dirt emphasize Emily’s buttocks and evoke anal sex and evacuation (see figure 4). She also holds a red and purple bouquet so that it is aligned with her backside, appears as a corollary to the dirt print, and evokes menstruation. An image of raspberry from the waist down shows pinkish red stains near her hips and groin, a trail of rusty red dripping down her ankle, and blackened toenails. Like menstruation, these TTD messes leak, remain visible after drying, and are connected to out-­of-­control states. Iris Marion Young, in her study of women’s corporeality, indicates how menstrual bleeding is culturally coded as “dirty, disgusting, defiling, and thus

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Figure 4. Troy, “Trashed !!! Emily TTD Session || May 31st,” Bellagala, June 3, 2009, http:// bellagala.com/photography/blogs/troy/index.php?m=06&y=09&entry=entry090603-­071313

must be hidden.”54 Unlike cultural pressures for women to conceal menstruation, women like raspberry can engage TTD filth and begin to disturb the mannered married body. In Emily’s last image, the grimy dress hangs out of a trash barrel and the bouquet is perched on the cover. Such dresses may be adopted, cleaned up, or discarded but something sticky and pleasurable remains. After reading about and viewing raspberry’s filth-­focused session, a cohort of forum readers decide that it is so much “FUN” that they should do it themselves.55 According to Creed, such moments are appealing, and abjection “is always there, beckoning the self to take up the place” where boundaries and meanings collapse. The “subject is constantly beset by abjection which fascinates desire but must be repelled for fear of self-­annihilation.”56 sweetmelissa experiences such ambivalence when changing into her “dress in a seedy restroom,” associating this TTD session with getting “every last ounce of joy out of ” her gown, and trying to “put it on without letting the bottom touch the icky concrete floor!!!” Karla-­rae Morris crosses a marsh with “baby slugs sticking” to her feet. “It was so gross” and “so much fun!” She stores her dress without cleaning it “because it’s more of a memory

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that way.” A Joelene Mills Photographer’s session, in which participants cover each other with spray paint, also generates ambiguous emotions and residual stains. Mills “felt bad when” the TTD participant told her “she ran out of hot water before she could get it all off !” raspberry claims not to “care either way” about getting her dress clean. However, the permanent dissolution of the wearable dress creates a kind of emotional and embodied incoherence, where she is “not that bothered,” “a little bothered but with an ‘it is done now’ type attitude,” and feels “awful!!!!” because her husband is “really upset.”57 Remnants of TTD sessions linger on participants’ bodies, are recorded in forum postings, and function as an additional and improper skin. Their abject affect combines with, and is read through, the fingerprints and grease marks on computer screens to constitute Internet settings as messy rather than rational and ordered. Such corporeal accretions point to embodied technologies and instances where women’s practices and hardware intermesh. Tainting Women TTD sessions where women are sullied, rather than actively getting dirty, are more disturbing. Defiling is always an aspect of TTD processes because women are directed to get dirty by the name of the phenomenon, although assured or even encouraged to stay somewhat clean by provisos about trashing. Violence is part of the history of the form since Cooper’s early and often remediated images, which are part of the lineage of TTD, include a bride set on fire and a woman in a wedding dress protruding from the trunk of a car. Her husband stands by the car with a shovel and seems ready to bury her. Eric has an often reposted image of a sodden bride with her hands bound behind her. In a number of TTD videos produced by StillMotion, the groom soils the bride’s dress. In one video, Phil directs handfuls of dust at Julia; before covering her face, neck, and dress, the dust hovers in the air because of the still-­motion video technique.58 The viewer observes these sequences and participates in defiling her, remembering earlier sequences where she is dirty and anticipating her repetitive ruination. The viewer may also worryingly be situated in relationship to more overt forms of aggression, particularly hostility toward women. Cooper’s images, like Hayley’s blood-­infused depictions, associate TTD with death and offer possible critiques of wedding cultures and normativity. They “kill” the wedding dress and reject the associated cultures, but Cooper, in a misogynistic gesture, also envisions the death of women.

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In Hien’s opening image, a couple is in an opulent setting with granite columns, carved stone walls, and coffered doors.59 The man tips his head slightly, holds a cigar to his mouth, and distractedly stares at the woman. His pose, the formal relationship between his black-­suited form and the columns, and the similar sheen on his bald head and the granite make him appear confident, wealthy, and self-­satisfied. In contrast to his self-­ possession, the woman is in a slightly disheveled wedding dress and is trying, but has failed, to open the door and escape. With a “change of scenery,” things do not improve. The couple is situated in an alley with graffiti-­ covered walls and a dumpster. There is “some pleading” as the bride in white subserviently kneels on the ground with her husband holding paint bottles over her. This does not work since she is then slathered in paint and pushed back against the wall. She holds onto the dress, but her partner rips it off and then wears a part of it as a kind of trophy in his jacket pocket. He displays the trashed dress, and she must hide, naked, behind him. While there are certainly performative elements to this TTD session, with the woman presenting dramatic gestures and horrified looks, the images also underscore a number of unpleasant gender binaries, including distinctions between feminine passivity and masculine activity, complacency and experimentation, frigidness and sensuality, and submission and conquest. On a visual and narrative level, the session evokes a rape scene, where the woman is forced into an erotic engagement and defiled. Conclusion: Zombie Viewing TTD rape narratives figure the maltreatment and oppression of women, but zombie sessions and other references to the undead offer some critical possibilities. Fuss theorizes a “vampiric structure of the look” because fashion magazines train women to feed off the images of other women and photography functions as a science “of the undead” and “mass producer of corpses, embalming each subject by captivating and fixing its image.”60 The lesbian vampiric gaze is encouraged by fashion’s “neck shots,” in which women pose “with their heads thrown back, their eyes closed, their lips slightly parted, their necks extended and exposed,” so that they are erotically available.61 This vampiric lesbian look is different from the distant male gaze because it demands separation, identification, and having the desired object by becoming it. Vampirism and cannibalism are dissimilar, for Fuss, as vampires incorporate the other by erotically feeding and creating a self-­ reflection, another vampire. Yet some contemporary conceptions of canni-

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balism render and reproduce expanded versions of the self. Zombies identify with their past as living bodies and the animation they still experience, have people by feeding on them, and turn others into reflections of their characteristics and desires. Identification also occurs when characters and viewers see people shifting and imagine becoming zombies. For instance, a character in Dawn of the Dead (dir. George A. Romero, 1978) looks out at the encroaching zombies and declares, “They’re us.” At such moments, zombie characters and viewers contaminate each other and fuse, no longer functioning as agentive subjects or unthinking objects, and point to the problematics of identities and humanness. Contemporary zombie and TTD representations function as social critiques and reproduce conventions. Viewers are encouraged to associate the plight of zombies with oppression, particularly racial subjugation, and “social abjection.”62 As Peter Dendle suggests in his study of how zombies stand in for cultural anxieties, these figures have shifted from expressing fears about a humanity that is unfeeling, homogeneous, unthinking, and dispirited to a society that is “enraged, feral, frantic, and insatiable.”63 This change offers a productive feminist model. The enraged and insatiable female, who in the case of zombie TTD sessions is cannibalistically polyamorous, is a threatening position and breaks with social conventions of passive and normed femininity. Admittedly, this emotional and unappeasable role can also overstate women’s association with sentiments and loss of control. TTD sessions reference zombies because they are resistant to cultural conceptions of bounded bodies, cleanliness, properness, binary identities, and rules and laws. Some viewers associate all sessions with the boundary disruptions and corporeal horrors of zombies. amorey is “so not into the zombie corpse brides washing up on shore.” She thinks that these sessions reflect negatively on cultural conceptions of weddings and home and “just can’t see . . . hanging a [sic] undead-­homicide-­victim-­found-­in-­a-­ swamp shot” of herself “up in the living room.” Other wedding forum participants embrace the undead possibilities of TTD and more abject aspects of women’s self-­representations. Mrs. Bunny believes that zombie brides present “The Ultimate TTD.” Mrs. Bunny comments on a woman in a white wedding dress with blood dripping from her mouth and running down her chest and bodice: “If that was her real dress, this bride is hardcore!” Mrs. Bunny “wouldn’t be up for dousing” her “dress in blood, but” would “consider a sweet, undead-­themed photo shoot.” Confronted by a woman with hands doused in fake blood and mouth smeared with what she is eat-

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ing, Mrs. Bunny notes, this “bride has ripped her groom’s heart out and is eating it! But what’s even more horrifying are the stains on the dress.”64 In her account, the murder and consumption of the groom is less upsetting than damaging the dress. Whether she is serious or briefly influenced by the staining of gowns, Mrs. Bunny positions women’s investments in wedding dresses and bridal cultures as more important than heterosexuality and personal relationships with men. TTD sessions deploy zombies and displace some of the consumerist mandates of weddings (although women may buy another dress and hire a photographer for these sessions). Images of shuffling zombies in shopping malls evoke dazed consumers. Yet the products and mandates of consumer culture have little meaning or value for the living dead. When Stef and Kevin deploy images of zombies, they begin to undo consumerism and the conventions of wedding photography.65 They were married on the same day as a zombie walk, where people dress and perform as zombies in public, and pose in front of a series of zombie brides and other participants. The freshness of their outfits and other quantifiable, clean, and new goods are troubled by the dirty smear of people moving in the background, vibrant red splatters of blood and gore, and alternative proposals for what brides look like. Candice and Greg were also married at a zombie walk. They “planned the entire thing in two weeks, and executed everything on a miniscule budget, covering” themselves “in blood and gore.” Candice’s favorite part of the event was “Showing up to the park, with” her “tattered, torn, stained and blood-­drenched groom, and seeing this crowd of strangers stop and stare as” she “looked into” her groom’s “eyes filled with love (and a few tears).” While weddings usually manage to connect the doctrines of consumer cultures and romantic love, Candice and Greg’s wedding dissociates these experiences. It also disturbs the purportedly coherent and solid body because red lace unevenly marks the edge of Candice’s do-­it-­yourself dress and associates wedding dresses with blood. As the dress sags, her red-­ smeared breasts unevenly fall from the structuring form and associate her with the leaking and abject female body.66 Jessica’s TTD session is also part of a zombie walk (see figure 5). Her revealing neckline and coquettish pose, with body slightly twisted, hands placed low on the hips, and lips puckered, present her as an available object for the male gaze. However, her cannibalistic zombie gaze, which is visible in a number of these images, highlights the dangers in seeing and having and proposes a resistant female position. Her mouth is smeared with blood; she appears to have consumed people; and she looks and puckers, ready to

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Figure 5. topher9, IMG_4400.0, Flickr, November 18, 2008, www.flickr.com/photos/ tierneyphotography/3007199180/in/set-­72157609374454507/

bite again. Since her eyes and mouth are similar slits, female seeing is correlated with controlling by eating. In one image of Candice, the veil covers her eyes, but she addresses spectators with open mouth and ready teeth. In other images, Jessica staggers toward and reaches for viewers.67 Her teeth are bared, and blood drips from her mouth, neck, and forehead. The blood on Jessica’s hand appears to have come from a recent meal, and she reaches out toward viewers, ready to incorporate them into her body and position. These women assert their position as enraged and insatiable females who make gazing less powerful by rendering ordinarily powerful bodies as consumable—mere objects for the maw of hungry and liquefying femininity. With such images and gestures, the rational and distant viewer, who is ordinarily understood as male, is contaminated by closeness and touching. Cannibalistic zombies propose ways of threatening normative masculinity and feeding off these positions. Monogamous heterosexuality is also replaced by a cannibalistic polyamory, in which all bodies are consumable. These zombies eat and process viewers, weddings, and participants into things that are productive for their viral and transformative bodies. In a related manner, female slash fiction fans (who remake media texts

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to emphasize the erotic relationships between same-­sex characters) and upcyclers (who convert trash into new materials or products) cannibalize the everyday and try to reform it into things that match their desires. TTD participants borrow props and rituals from weddings but do not fully perpetuate the accompanying heterosexual arrangements, identity positions, and consumerist mandates. TTD sessions contaminate wedding rituals by portraying a monstrous afterward. The aspects of TTD that reinforce dominant norms include the tendency to extend the photographic patrolling of women’s embodiment, representations of violence against women, the expense of extra photographic sessions, reliance on white dresses, preponderance of Caucasian participants, and women purchasing additional wedding dresses (because they do not want to ruin the one they were married in). However, TTD practices make erotic engagements between women, abjection, and resistance part of weddings. More generally, the erotica collecting (in which women look for, accumulate, save, and post pictures of women in sessions) and lesbian responses of TTD are reminders of the diverse desires that circulate in Internet settings, desires that do not have to correlate to individuals’ and cultures’ presumptions about lived sexual practices. As the significance of Internet sites increases, it is going to become more difficult to keep these lesbian and queer engagements contained with stories about traditional weddings and heterosexuality. Notes Newcomb College Institute and Tulane University supported this research with grant funding, and Ellis Hanson provided important critical commentary. 1 Lynette Seelmeyer, “True Blood,” Rock n’ Roll Bride, December 4, 2009, www.rockn rollbride.com/2009/12/true-­blood/ (accessed August 26, 2010). 2 I have found only one visual example of a same-­sex couple performing in a TTD session. Blue Olive Photography, “Margo and Sherwin’s Granville Island Wedding,” October 3, 2008, www.blueolivephotography.com/blog/2008/10/03/granville-­island-­ wedding/ (accessed May 18, 2010). 3 The humanities methods of close visual, textual, and theoretical analysis provide me with ways of studying the similar notions of trashing that are promoted in wedding forums, photographers’ blogs, the Trash the Dress Internet sites, and news reports. Research on more than three thousand wedding forum and blog posts informs this article. Critical literature is also a key part of this project. Feminist writing about wedding cultures suggests the conceptions of heterosexuality, women, and femininity that are rendered by these rituals. Feminist theories of the gaze, including studies of fashion magazines and horror, explain how women are figured as visually available to other women and difficult to look at. Examinations of dirt, abjection, and fluid bodies point

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to the ways the TTD processes of getting wedding dresses wet and filthy challenge normative femininity. This literature provides methods for resisting the clean and proper body—the kind of solid, autonomous, and heterosexual subject that is constituted through traditional Western wedding cultures and the shaping aspects of white dresses. John Michael Cooper, “Show Off ! (a.k.a. Trashing the Dress),” Wed Shooter, February 1, 2006, http://web.archive.org/web/20060207051456/www.wedshooter.com/ 2006/02/01/show-­off-­aka-­trashing-­the-­dress (accessed May 18, 2010). Izzy Grinspan, “Wedding Trashers,” Salon, June 30, 2007, www.salon.com/mwt/ feature/2007/06/30/wedding_dress/; and Mark Eric, “Our Other Blog—TTD,” Mark Eric Photo Journal, May 5, 2007, http://markeric.wordpress.com/2007/05/05/200702 04_9999_187copyjpg/ (accessed May 18, 2010). Photographers also encourage young women to adopt similar sessions as an aspect of their postprom experience. Robin Summerfield, “Trashing the Dress,” Calgary Herald, July 13, 2007, www .canada.com/topics/ lifestyle/story.html?id=92e34b79-­d 8d7-­4 8de-­8 6c2-­2 deffef1 df1e&k=74118; and Cheryl Chan, “Tie the Knot and Trash the Dress,” Province (Vancouver), September 9, 2007, www2.canada.com/theprovince/news/unwind/story .html?id=424a7c3f-­349e-­456e-­9ed5-­5b13238dedf9&p=1. “Wedding Money: What Does the Average Wedding Cost?” The Knot, http://wedding .theknot.com/wedding-­p lanning /wedding-­b udget/qa/what-­d oes-­t he-­a verage-­ wedding-­cost.aspx (accessed May 4, 2010); and “Wedding Statistics and Industry Market Totals for United States,” The Wedding Report, 2010, www.theweddingreport.com/ wmdb/index.cfm?action=db.viewdetail (accessed May 4, 2010) (such numbers are critiqued by Carl Bialik, “The Numbers Guy,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2007, http:// blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/calculating-­the-­cost-­of-­weddings-­175/ [accessed May 18, 2010]); Angela Saurine, “Average Wedding Now Costs $50,000,” PerthNow, February 18, 2009, www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,25073001-­5005370,00.html; and “Your Big Day Doesn’t Have to Mean a Big Bill,” Independent (London), May 10, 2009, www.independent.co.uk/money/spend-­save/your-­big-­day-­doesnt-­have-­to-­mean-­ a-­big-­bill-­1682080.html. Cele Otnes and Tina M. Lowrey, “’Til Debt Do Us Part: The Selection and Meaning of Artifacts in the American Wedding,” Advances in Consumer Research 20 (1993): 325–29. Ramona Faith Oswald, “A Member of the Wedding? Heterosexism and Family Ritual,” in Lesbian Rites: Symbolic Acts and the Power of Community, ed. Ramona Faith Oswald (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2003), 107–31, 108. Stevi Jackson, “Gender, Sexuality and Heterosexuality: The Complexity (and Limits) of Heteronormativity,” Feminist Theory 7.1 (2006): 105–21, 105. Sherril Horowitz Schuster, “Here Comes the Bride: Wedding Announcements and Bridal Norms,” Sociological Focus 30.3 (1997): 279–94. Charles Lewis, “Working the Ritual: Professional Wedding Photography and the American Middle Class,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 22.1 (1998): 72–92. Jeffery Sobal, Caron Bove, and Barbara Rauschenbach, “Weight and Weddings: The Social Construction of Beautiful Brides,” in Interpreting Weight: The Social Management of Fatness and Thinness, ed. Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer (New York: de Gruyter, 1999), 113–35, 131.

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Denise Neufeld, “Salton Sea—more amazing Brides (and photography),” Trash the Dress! January 25, 2008, http://trashthedress.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/salton-­sea-­ more-­amazing-­brides-­and-­photography/. Carol Duncan, “The MoMA’s Hot Mamas,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 347–58. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14–28, 19. Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3. “Wedding Blog by Weddingbee,” Weddingbee, www.weddingbee.com (accessed March 31, 2010); “Wedding Dresses—Wedding Songs—Wedding Ideas—Wedding Websites,” Project Wedding, www.projectwedding.com (accessed March 31, 2010); “About Us— Project Wedding,” Project Wedding, www.projectwedding.com/info/about_us (accessed March 31, 2010); and “Weddings Australia, Wedding Dresses Invitations Gowns Cakes Venues—Easy Weddings,” Easy Weddings, www.easyweddings.com.au (accessed March 31, 2010). Diana Fuss, “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look,” Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992): 713–37, 713. Annamari Vänskä, “Why Are There No Lesbian Advertisements?” Feminist Theory 6.1 (2005): 67–85, 70. Reina Lewis and Katrina Rolley, “Ad(dressing) the Dyke: Lesbian Looks and Lesbian Looking,” in Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures, ed. Peter Horne and Reina Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 178–90, 179. Fuss, “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look,” 714. Lewis and Rolley, “Ad(dressing) the Dyke,” 181. jilliibabii, “Re: ‘Trash the dress,’” NYCity Weddings, October 7, 2009, www.nycity weddings.com/chat/topic.aspx?ID=642069&Highlight=trash (accessed February 27, 2010). cld606, “Trash the Dress Pictures,” Project Wedding, August 28, 2009, www.project wedding.com/post/list/trash-­the-­dress-­pictures (accessed March 27, 2010); m.h.1.23, “Trash the Dress Pictures,” Project Wedding, August 28, 2009, www.projectwedding .com/post/list/trash-­the-­dress-­pictures (accessed March 27, 2010); and Sarahinwonderland, “Trash the dress inspiration Post em ladies!,” Project Wedding, February 19, 2009, www.projectwedding.com/post/list/trash-­the-­dress-­inspiration-­post-­em-­ ladies?page=4 (accessed February 27, 2010). Don Slater, “Trading Sexpics on IRC: Embodiment and Authenticity on the Internet,” Body and Society 4.4 (1998): 91–117; and Michele White, “Listing eBay Masculinity: Erotic Exchanges and Regulation in ‘Gay’ and ‘Gay Interest’ Underwear and Swimwear Auctions,” Journal of Gender Studies 19.1 (2010): 43–58. See for instance, Swimming Fully Clothed Blog, http://blog.swimmingfullyclothed .com/ (accessed May 17, 2010). misshammy, “{Trash the Dress},” Project Wedding, June 18, 2009, www.project wedding.com/biography/list/MrsRaz/trash-­the-­dress (accessed March 27, 2010); midnyteblue110609, “{Trash the Dress}”; misshammy, “TRASH THE DRESS TEASER PICTURES!,” Project Wedding, October 12, 2009, www.projectwedding.com/post/

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list/trash-­the-­dress-­teaser-­pictures?page=3 (accessed March 27, 2010); and MommyLynda, “Trash the dress inspiration Post em ladies!” Project Wedding, February 19, 2009, www.projectwedding.com/post/list/trash-­the-­dress-­inspiration-­post-­em-­ladies (accessed April 2, 2010). Reina Lewis, “Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery,” Feminist Review, no. 55 (1997): 92–109, 94. Elizabeth Freeman, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 34. Chou Chou, “Chou Chou’s TTD Shoot :),” Easy Weddings, March 13, 2010, www.easy weddings.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23696&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=TTD (accessed May 18, 2010); cherie, “Re: Chou Chou’s TTD Shoot :),” Easy Weddings, March 16, 2010, www.easyweddings.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23696&st= 0&sk=t&sd=a&hilit=TTD&start=10 (accessed May 18, 2010); Karishma, “Re: Chou Chou’s TTD Shoot :)”; darkwing, “Chou Chou’s TTD Shoot :),” Easy Weddings, March 14, 2010, www.easyweddings.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=23696&st=0&sk= t&sd=a&hilit=TTD (accessed May 18, 2010); and Angelsmith Photography, “Kat & Amy {Trash the Dress},” March 11, 2010, www.angelsmithphotography.com.au/2010/03/ katamy-­ttd-­full/. Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 192, 203. Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). Linda Williams, “When the Woman Looks,” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 15–34, 23. Frugal Bride, “Will you trash your dress?” Weddingbee, March 27, 2010, http://boards .weddingbee.com/topic/will-­you-­trash-­your-­dress; veganglam, “Will you trash your dress?”; ginantonic, “Will you trash your dress?”; ant n tilde, “Re: ‘Trash the dress’ Photos,” NYCity Weddings, April 11, 2007, www.nycityweddings.com/chat/topic-­393 980-­1.html (accessed May 10, 2010); and Nicola Lambert, “Nicola Lambert Hyde— UK,” Trash the Dress—Europe, September 21, 2008, http://trashthedress.eu/page/2/ (accessed May 18, 2010). See, for example, Jean-­Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 286–98; and Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 51. florazul, “EYE CANDY: TRASH THE DRESS(ES),” Project Wedding, February 2, 2010, www.projectwedding.com/post/list/eye-­candy-­trash-­the-­dress-­es. For discussions of the ways Internet and computer technologies are associated with the mind and men, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006). Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 192.

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Stone Ridge Photographers, “Stone Ridge Photographers Trash the Dress,” www .stoneridgephotographers.com/TTD_SRP.htm (accessed May 18, 2010); Stacy Able, “Trash the Dress you Say?” Stacy Able Photography, May 15, 2009, http://stacyable.com/ blog/2009/05/15/trash-­the-­dress-­you-­say-­what/ (accessed May 18, 2010); and Mark Eric, “The Struggle,” Mark Eric Photo Journal, October 1, 2009, www.markeric.com/ ?p=1258 (accessed April 14, 2010). Alyssa Andrew Photography, www.alyssaandrew.com/main.php#imagegalleries/-­% 20galleries%20–/Trash%20the%20dress/8; www.alyssaandrew.com/main.php#image galleries/-­%20galleries%20–/Trash%20the%20dress/14; and www.alyssaandrew.com/ main.php#imagegalleries/-­%20galleries%20–/Trash%20the%20dress/10 (accessed May 19, 2010). Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-­Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993), 29. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4. Karen Jacobs, “Optic/Haptic/Abject: Revisioning Indigenous Media in Victor Masayesva, Jr and Leslie Marmon Silko,” Journal of Visual Culture 3.3 (2004): 291–316. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 192, 207. Ibid., 203. Whitmeyer Photography, “Katie Monroe Trashes The Dress!!!!” May 28, 2009, http:// whitmeyerphotography.blogspot.com/2009/05/ katie-­monroe-­trashes-­dress.html (accessed May 18, 2010). Ben and Juliana, “Trash The Dress Two,” The Streff Syndrome, June 17, 2009, http:// streffsak.blogspot.com/2009/06/trash-­dress-­two.html (this site no longer functional); raspberry, “My TTD (with photos!),” Easy Weddings, March 1, 2009, www.easy weddings.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=16391 (accessed May 22, 2009; this site no longer functional); and Litwin Photography, “Breanne Trashed Her Dress,” March6,2010, www.litwinphotography.com/blog/2010/03/breanne-­trashed-­her-­dress-­ litwin-­photography-­lethbridge-­wedding-­photographer/. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 195. Troy, “Trashed !!! Emily TTD Session || May 31st,” Bellagala, June 3, 2009, www.bellagala .us/photography/ blogs/troy/index.php?m=06&y=09&entry=entry090603-­0 71313 (accessed May 19, 2010). Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 107. Chazitha, “Re: My TTD (no photos yet),” Easy Weddings, March 1, 2009, www.easy weddings.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=16391&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&sid=e 51bbdc4614d1565841bf21c9e120c24&start=10 (May 22, 2009; this site no longer functional). Creed, The Monstrous-­Feminine, 10. sweetmelissa, “You did WHAT with you wedding dress?,” Brides.com, August 22, 2007, www.brides.com/forums/fashion-­focus/thread.jspa?messageID=297570 (accessed May 18, 2010); Karla-­rae Morris as quoted in Chris Zdeb, “Junkyard Photos Put Brides in High Trashion: Dumpsters, Trucks, and Scrapyards Give a Rusty Edge to Imagery,” Times Colonist (Victoria, B.C.), April 5, 2009, www.timescolonist.com/Travel/Junkyard+

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photos+brides+high+trashion/1466503/story.html; ~Joelene~, 211, Flickr, June 30, 2007, www.flickr.com/photos/athenebiws/1461081749/in/set-­72157600579955237/ (accessed May 18, 2010); raspberry, “Re: My TTD (no photos yet),” Easy Weddings, March 2, 2009, www.easyweddings.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=16391&st= 0&sk=t&sd=a&sid=e51bbdc4614d1565841bf21c9e120c24&start=10 (accessed May 22, 2009; this site no longer functional); and raspberry, “Re: My TTD (with photos!),” Easy Weddings, March 28, 2009, www.easyweddings.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?f= 9&t=16391&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=40 (accessed May 22, 2009; this site no longer functional). StillMotion, “Julia + Phil Trash the Dress,” Vimeo, September 25, 2008, http://vimeo .com/1815274 (accessed May 18, 2010). Jo O’Brien, “Trash The Dress Shoot,” RedBubble, May 1, 2008, www.redbubble.com/ people/photography/journal/1081283–trash-­the-­dress-­shoot (accessed May 18, 2010). Fuss, “Fashion and the Homospectatorial Look,” 728 and 729. Ibid., 729. Stephen Harper, “Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1900 to Present 1.2 (2002), www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/harper.htm. Peter Dendle, “The Zombie as a Barometer of Cultural Anxiety,” in Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Niall Scott (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1994), 54. amorey, “Trash The Dress—The new post-­wedding trend,” ConstantChatter, June 18, 2007, www.constantchatter.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-­34054.html (accessed May 18, 2010); and Mrs. Bunny, “Zombie Brides—The Ultimate TTD,” ­Weddingbee, June 19, 2009, www.weddingbee.com/2009/06/19/zombie-­brides-­the-­ultimate-­ttd/ (accessed May 18, 2010). Reilly and Miranda, “Stef & Kevin,” Blue Olive Photography, August 30, 2008, www .blueolivephotography.com/blog/tag/zombiewalk/ (accessed May 18, 2010). Candice as quoted in offbeatmegan, “Candice & Greg’s Zombie Walk Wedding,” Offbeat Bride, July 3, 2009, http://offbeatbride.com/2009/07/zombie-­walk-­wedding (accessed May 18, 2010); Cele Otnes and Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck, Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and kw.zombiebride, n501649803_1507765_7222, Flickr, December 15, 2008, www.flickr .com/photos/33389555@N02/3111524524/in/set-­72157611222093897/ (accessed May 4, 2010). topher9, IMG_4400.0, Flickr, November 18, 2008, www.flickr.com/photos/tierney photography/3007199180/in/set-­72157609374454507/ (accessed May 19, 2010); kw.zombiebride, DSC00973, Flickr, October 18, 2008, www.flickr.com/photos/333895 55@N02/3683519148/in/set-­72157611222093897/ (accessed May 4, 2010); and topher9, IMG_4291, Flickr, November 18, 2008, www.flickr.com/photos/tierneyphotography/ 3006355705/in/set-­72157609374454507/ (accessed May 6, 2010).

Ellis Hanson The Child as Pornographer

A mong the more prolific child pornographers

now are the children themselves. The very term child pornographer enjoys a grammatical ambiguity that digital culture has slowly been learning to read over the past decade. Does the term refer to an adult who produces pornography that features children, a child who produces pornography, or perhaps any person who provides pornographic services for a child? The digital sexual revolution has encouraged a new breed of sexual offender who thrives particularly well online: the child as producer of child pornography, the child as exploiter of child prostitution, the child as self-­employed child prostitute, and the child as sexual abuser of other children. We always feared the children had it in them, but with the arrival of popular digital technology for imaging, communication, and money transfer online, they have found an easily accessible, easily transmittable, and sometimes very profitable arena. By “children,” I mean anyone under the age of consent, since vice law in the United States and dozens of other nations distinguishes between preteens and most teenagers only in the relative severity of consistently severe sentencing (if at all), thus giving rise to such dubiously inclusive categories as “children under eighteen.” Nearly every effort

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at legislation and technology to censor Web sites or render them less accessible, especially sites with explicit sexual content, has focused on making the Internet safer for children. In recent years, however, the opposite has also been true, an increasing public controversy over making the Internet safer from children. This scrutiny of children—even young adults—online characterizes the Internet and mobile phone networks as unruly children of sorts and the unruly children with digital gadgets as tech-­savvy Internet predators. Its convenience and pleasures aside, the Internet has often been seen as blameless but too compulsive and sex obsessed, vulnerable but too dangerous and cruel, ignorant but too knowing and mysterious, banal but too exhibitionistic and bizarre—and so have the children who use it now. Mobile phones and the Internet enable new and difficult-­to-­police venues not only for child pornography and prostitution but also for sexting, camwhoring, cyberbullying, cyberstalking, cybersnooping, sidejacking, ego porn, revenge porn, obscene text roulette, and sundry sexual indiscretions on social-­networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, to name a few digital practices that render children more vulnerable and more threatening. Child pornography legislation of the late 1970s effectively ended commercial production of child pornography in the United States, though by no means in the rest of the world, and inhibited private circulation of images. Child prostitution has been criminalized for a much longer time. Nevertheless, despite an international escalation in human rights legislation regarding the exploitation of children, the efforts of law enforcement to suppress the production, distribution, or possession of child pornography have been rendered difficult, if not futile, since live digital imaging, personal Web sites, and online file sharing have made such contraband simple to produce and distribute globally in an instant, whether for commercial purposes or not.1 Children, especially the ones who happen also to be teenaged minors, often exchange gossip and images that sexually expose themselves and others for amusement, profit, or vengeance. Legislators have long been aware that extremely strict statutes on child sexual abuse and child pornography may be applicable to consenting minors and adults, including parents, who assumed they were not breaking the law or abusing anyone when their art projects, family photos, nudist photos, and anime DVDs were discovered in police searches, art displays, film-­processing shops, seized computers, Web sites, and Internet postings. Increasingly, there is legislation that distinguishes between degrees of harm, between the commonplace sexual activity of underaged youth and the coercive sexual exploitation of minors by adults, but the laws still have a long history of backfiring and

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criminalizing young people who should be, on the contrary, protected. The worst victims of this irony are the consenting teenagers and younger children who are put on trial for felonies that could, in the logic of such laws in the United States, find them publicly registered as sex offenders for the rest of their lives. Although some states have sought to legalize these suspect erotic exchanges between minors (Vermont) or reduce them to misdemeanors (Connecticut, New York, Utah), there still remains the legal and cultural question of teenagers who sell or otherwise distribute online erotic images of themselves to adults or to one another, illicit images that can then be recirculated at will by anyone who receives them. Technology has a rich history of raising concerns about the corruption of children and even the collapse of childhood as a social category. In 1982, for example, Neil Postman proclaimed “the disappearance of childhood” because of television, which he referred to as a “full-­disclosure medium.”2 He found it troubling that both children and adults were watching All in the Family, Happy Days, and banal talk shows about incest. Prior to television, literacy skills and written text had produced a significant inequality of knowledge between adults and children that preserved the latter’s innocence and ignorance. With television, however, children would see a performance of all they did not know without ever having to read about it. The very concept of a full-­disclosure medium is, of course, an oxymoron, but television, which officially vanished in 2009, would have been an especially poor candidate for such a term in the 1970s and 1980s, since it was one of the most heavily censored of popular media. To be shocked by old network television seems quaint to us now. The Internet, however, and the early training that children receive in computer literacy and interactivity have renewed such anxieties with unprecedented force. According to a study by Norton Online Family of fifteen million Internet searches by young people in 2009, sex and porn came fourth and fifth in the list of the most popular search terms, after YouTube, Google, and Facebook.3 Porn came in fourth for children aged seven and under (beating Club Penguin, Cartoon Network, and Disney), while sex came in fourth for children aged eight to eighteen (with porn popping up not much farther down the list). The porn searches were much more popular with boys than with girls, but both genders had an intense interest in sex, which got displaced by Taylor Swift to number five in searches by girls. For parents who find this news distressing, Norton provides advice on Internet safety, as well as a service that can monitor everything a child does online. With digital gadgetry and connectivity, the “disappearance” of childhood is oddly an effect of overexposure and surveillance

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that leaves us in an ambiguous moral territory, as the arguably victimless crime of children sexually exposing themselves online, whether for pay or not, collides with common assumptions about consent, privacy, obscenity, prostitution, parental control, and childhood innocence. Exemplary of this moral ambiguity are the media reportage and commentary about Justin Berry. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, in his family’s home in Bakersfield, California, and later with his father in Mexico, Berry reportedly created his own successful and illegal porn site with himself as the main attraction. Later in this career, before and after he came of age, he included other teenagers and older adults as business partners or fellow performers. With the help of his father, his clients, and other adults and peers, he reportedly earned hundreds of thousands of untaxed dollars through his pornographic Web sites, all of which he evidently spent. When he turned eighteen he could potentially have been tried as an adult for a list of crimes having to do with child pornography, blackmail, prostitution, child abuse, and tax evasion, but he was not. In 2005, he was tracked down by Kurt Eichenwald, a seasoned whistle-­blower and at the time a reporter for the New York Times, who later that year claimed to have rescued Berry from a life of drug addiction and child exploitation.4 Berry briefly continued with his business until he was persuaded to reveal the identities of his roster of clients in return for judicial immunity, at which point he presented himself as an innocent victim of clever and manipulative pedophiles and sexual predators online. He was interviewed by Eichenwald for the Times, but also appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, and the Today show, as well as before the U.S. Congress in its investigation of online child exploitation. He is currently still telling his story as a paid speaker on the lecture circuit—and, of course, online. One of the many paradoxes of Berry in his clearly scripted interviews with Eichenwald is his uncanny ability to conjoin a sincere innocence and victimhood seamlessly with an outrageous libertinism and knowingness.5 I refer to him here as a child, since he was frequently so designated in media accounts even though he was a teenager throughout his porn career. Adults can sometimes fascinate the media with their erotic innocence, as was the case with Linda Lovelace and Michael Jackson, but even in these instances an improbable obliviousness or helplessness is easily characterized by commentators as “childlike.” Berry was not only a childlike adult but an adultlike child. His age seems uncannily irrelevant in his performance of adult and child at the same time, and at the trial of one of his business associates, Kenneth Gourlay, he even had difficulty remembering how old he

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was when certain alleged crimes took place. The evidence of his business acumen, sexual awareness, and technical know-­how from the age of thirteen onward is impressive enough, but much odder is his ability at the age of eighteen to look as if he were a lonely, confused, and ultimately innocent thirteen-­year-­old with a gawky frame, shy demeanor, and pubescently unsteady voice. In the Times video interview, the section titled “They Offered Money” records Berry’s account of the swift seduction of his innocence by “pedophiles” or “adult sexual predators” who he claimed were his only real friends. His performance is a verbal striptease about a visual striptease: he confesses to Eichenwald how he came to accept money to take off first his shirt and later the rest of his clothes. The credibility of his innocence relies on his seeming as if he were a child who is shocked and baffled by the world of the adult he once was or was somehow forced to be. Regarding what he was asked to do online, he says, “Certain really odd requests sometimes. There’s been some weird people out there. Anywhere from ‘Let me see your feet’ to ‘Get naked.’” His understanding of the sexually odd and weird is oddly and weirdly limited in its range. We might understandably not suspect from this performance of sexual naïveté that he had earned and spent a fortune in relative secrecy, that he was popular enough to be his class president, that he made plane trips to meet business partners and sexual contacts, that he avoided prosecution by moving his operation to Mexico to secure the business assistance of his own father (who had been charged with tax evasion in the United States), that he engaged in consensual sex on camera on the Internet with other minors and prostitutes whom he and his father procured, that he smoked marijuana and used cocaine, and that he cut a deal for judicial immunity by turning state’s evidence with a massive file of the names and credit card information of his subscribers and business partners. But eventually all this is revealed in the Times—and he still looks thirteen and innocent (see figure 1). He repeats his story in numerous public appearances, ending the tale unsurprisingly with his conversion to Christianity. The New York Times offered a photograph of him with hands aloft, apparently praising the Lord in a church. In the course of this performative sleight of hand, as deft as it was dubious, he makes a teenaged camwhore seem like the Infant Samuel without ever losing his salacious edge. Berry’s earnest testimony before Congress about how he had been manipulated and exploited online by sexual predators was a command performance he could scarcely decline, given his pressing need for immunity from prosecution and the government’s pressing need to look alarmed and

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Figure 1. Chip Somodevilla, “Victim Testifies on Internet Child Pornography,” April 4, 2006, supplied by Getty Images News

more vigilant.6 In this testimony, he says he is not asking for his behavior to be excused, but by this time, legally speaking, it already had been. Last I checked, only three or four of his business partners had been convicted of crimes in trials where he served as witness, though other clients were already in jail for other crimes. All of them, like Berry, engaged in conduct deemed illegal, and his betrayal of them, the hypocrisy of which threatens to compromise his performance of innocence, has to be framed as a heroic effort of will to cast off the influence of the truly predatory adult sex offenders who are the only real villains and criminals of the story. One of the convicted men, Kenneth Gourlay, had invited Berry, who was nearly sixteen at the time, to a “computer camp” in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he could learn to expand his online business (getting molested at camp is much more sophisticated than it used to be). Berry made the plane trip to meet him and spoke of the “loads of fun” he had, but in his court testimony he claimed that he was molested and traumatized by Gourlay. After this trip to Michigan, they made still more trips to visit each other, and both the business partnership and the molestation continued apace. Unfortunately, on the first trip, Berry was still two months short of the age of consent in Michigan, and so his molester, who was twenty-­four at the time, was later convicted on twenty-­two counts of sexual misconduct with regard to Berry and another teenager of their acquaintance.7 There is a picture of Berry at an airport in Mazatlán with his molester, who is now serving a prison sentence of ten to twenty years. This photograph, which was taken by Knute Berry, Justin’s father, using Gourlay’s digital camera, has popped up on numerous Web sites and renders risible the use of the term molester in this

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case.8 Here they appear almost as mirror images of each other, in that they are both young and about the same height, wear about the same clothes, and have about the same hair. Friends, boyfriends, brothers? Are they in Mexico for business, pleasure, or child abuse? Hard to say. The airport icon over the sign for departures suggests that the picture represents a happy and friendly parting after a visit, but it also seems to refigure the two men as themselves a sort of new departure, as emblems of modern transit and connectivity with their Internet-­like movement across state and national borders and the advanced technology that made their business possible. Gourlay’s youth and attractiveness belie the popular understanding of how a “pedophile” or “sexual predator” should look. Eichenwald, however, appears to fit the stereotype perfectly (see figure 1). In both his Times article and the video interview, he paradoxically reenacts the very scenario he ostensibly deplores: a fat, fortyish, balding, unattractive man soliciting lurid sexual confessions from a boy prostitute whom he has paid and pursued online. The only accessory missing is a priest’s cassock. He hunts down the pedophiles doggedly by hunting down the child doggedly. “How much did they offer?” he queries, as if amassing material for a how-­ to manual. “How are they going to get you fifty dollars?” “Is this PayPal. com?” “Why was that moment, the moment where you take off your shirt for money, so important?” This faux-­naïf cross-­examination about shady money transfers online has the usual duplicity of tone of a journalistic exposé of victimhood that is scripted for optimal benefit to both parties and that admits of no substantive contrary perspective: the aggression of an inquisitor failing to hide a celebration of mutual exploitation in what was, at the time, an excellent career choice for both men. The chief victim in this particular exchange is PayPal, which gets some bad press and suddenly sounds like an insidious screen name for an anonymous sexual predator online. The irony is further adumbrated by the lingering suspicion, expressed by a few Internet commentators in the succeeding months, that Berry had not so much reformed as merely gone legitimate. With the help of Eichenwald, his new paypal, he could scrub his reputation clean of actionable obscenity and offer instead the sexual suggestiveness of relatively coy details disguised as contrite confession. He becomes the “pornography of the Puritan,” to borrow a choice phrase from Richard Hofstadter,9 and can take his online business to the next level, where he could appear on Oprah with impunity and enormously widen his audience. Instead of getting paid to take off his shirt on camera, he could get paid for just talking on camera about taking off his shirt on camera. He currently has a Web

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site with tips about Internet safety and sexual predators explicitly formatted for the education of teens or parents. The site also promises a new “KIDS ONLY ZONE!” coming soon that will feature “Fun Videos” and “Interactive Games.”10 Given his long history of producing illicit, interactive porn sites that could easily answer to the description of this kids only zone, his wording might understandably give us pause. Thus far, all he shows us on this Web page is a picture of himself (clothed, with bigger hair than he used to have), as if he were still just one of the kids, even at the age of his own “molester,” twenty-four. Eichenwald’s contribution to the story and its telling is also deft and dubious in its salacious pieties, but his ethical pretensions have now been mostly discredited. His journalistic ethics were censured by the Times but even more damningly by the journalist Debbie Nathan, who was already renowned for her controversial writing on child pornography, moral panics, “recovered” traumatic memory, and modern media and government witch hunts.11 He threatened to sue her and succeeded in quashing her article about him in Salon, but in Counterpunch and on her own Web site she drew on revelations from the trials of Berry’s business partners to report that Eichenwald had made secret payments to Berry, had gained administrative privileges on Berry’s porn site and visited it several times, had exchanged messages and photographs with him, and had encouraged him in his illicit business, all under a false name and identity before the two men had ever met and before Berry, who would have been by then technically an adult sex offender, had ceased his illicit business.12 Eichenwald claimed he was merely “posing” as a sexual predator to rescue Berry from exploitation. Such posing and rescue operations would, of course, also be illegal without the cooperation of law enforcement throughout the process, which he was not claiming he had. Nathan wisely understated the significance of her findings, since threats of a lawsuit were in the air, but she made it clear that he had reason to be concerned, since the evidence, if valid, would indicate that he had committed not just a journalistic faux pas but a serious felony. She leaves the field wide open for further speculation about how and why Eichenwald came to know about the site at all, how he could have gathered evidence without breaking the law, whether he was at some point just another one of Berry’s clients, and whether he himself has a closeted homoerotic interest in child pornography. These questions of criminal behavior aside, Eichenwald’s presentation of the story is itself a work of pedophile gothic with a pair of narrators we might reasonably have suspected at the time were unreliable. As is fre-

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quently the case with gothic genres, the narration in Eichenwald’s reports uncannily mimics the erotics of the scandalous secret it seeks teasingly to expose, thereby making transgression and innocence appear to trade places. The immediacy and sensuality of the transgressive sexual acts are displaced by a sensationalism of narrative desire. In this case, the visual details are necessarily vague or withheld. They must literally disappear, since they happen to be illegal to possess or distribute, and so we are not even permitted to search for them on our own. The images we see are banal and miss the point. The astonishing casualness and ease of Berry’s camwhoring render it oddly mundane; even a child could do it and then talk about it as if it were a school project. As the transgression itself recedes ever farther, its place is taken by its narration, which is erotically intensified not just by the scandalous sexual subject matter it must describe, but also by the suspense of revelations that never quite reveal, the politely penetrative aggression of the interviewer, the striking intensity of the boyman-­on-­manboy dynamic, and the suggestive hints of a deeper connection between these unlikely reporters that even some of the earliest commentators could sense, if not prove. Further revelations about Eichenwald’s ethical lapses and Berry’s enthusiasm for his porn career simply render explicit with facts what was already rendered implicit through the style and dynamics of the genre. “They Offered Money,” the interview exchange about exchange, is all the more ironic in that Eichenwald himself is alleged to have paid Berry money and posed as one of his admirers in order to make initial contact with him. The logic here, if the facts are correct, would be familiar enough: it takes one to know one, a thief to catch a thief. Although he does not admit any wrongdoing in his article or in his interview videos, Eichenwald was later reported to have made secret payments to Berry totaling at least $3,100, payments he claimed to have forgotten because of memory loss he suffered due to the epilepsy he acquired after a concussion in his youth. These particular memory lapses proved especially bothersome in their thorough obliteration of facts that would have undermined his credibility, an obliteration surprising for a journalist renowned for his attention to detail and record keeping, which are otherwise impressively on display throughout the article. Berry may not be the only one feigning innocence in the Times article. The account of memory lapses makes Eichenwald seem himself to be a sort of traumatized child who cannot recall certain primal scenes that might explain too much. In an interview with New York Magazine, he presented himself as indeed truly traumatized by the response to his article: he is terrified by threats, he hides in his house, he can no

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longer work, he often cries and gets intensely angry, and he is repeatedly and publicly humiliated by Nathan, whom he refers to as the “high priestess of pedophilia.”13 This account of his misfortunes in the aftermath of the attacks on his professionalism is certainly painful to read and elicits sympathy, but it also presents Eichenwald as a sort of embittered, cyberbullied child, an image that resonates well with his persona in his interviews with Berry. Like Freud’s child detective, we join Eichenwald at the foot of Berry’s virtual bed. We are adults needing to look and listen carefully while the child-­man Berry explains the secret inner workings of all he uncannily knows about sex but must not claim to have understood. We are expected to get upset. As concerned adults, however, we become child detectives only to become a sort of pedophile, riveted by illustrated tales of a child’s erotic adventures online. In his Oprah interview, which first aired in February 2006, about two months after his Times article, Eichenwald exclaimed, “By that time, I knew that this kid was at the center of a massive criminal enterprise—that he knew everything!”14 He sounds oddly like the governess in Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw when she discovers that the children in her charge know terrible secrets and are determined to defeat her because they have been corrupted by insidious adults and their ghosts. Eichenwald, however, is several steps ahead of the governess in his exploration of the secrets of a child about an unspeakable scene, we might even say a primal scene, that only the child in us can ever witness: “I saw a pornographic Web site that had hundreds and hundreds of webcam videos of children. I have never worked on anything that has made me so upset. I have seen things that nobody should ever see.” Nobody, of course, except the children themselves, the hundreds and hundreds more men who must be paying them, and the investigative child-­reporter who gives us only a little news about the secret he has seen with impunity but we cannot. This is not to say that Berry’s story was universally credited, even at the time it was first recounted in the Times and on Oprah. A lively and voluminous debate raged online even then about the ethical or unethical behavior of Berry and Eichenwald both, including opinions expressed on the Times’s editorial page and Oprah’s own message board. The discussion of Berry divides neatly into a steamy competition between two very different narratives, neither of which is necessarily accurate or even provable by anyone but Eichenwald and Berry themselves. One is the narrative that follows the familiar lines of pedophile gothic melodrama by which an innocent child is seduced and corrupted by evil predators and then rescued by a conspicuously self-­effacing altruist. The other narrative is the decidedly

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cynical obverse. A bored but very smart teenager seeks money and some sexual thrills by learning to profit from the criminalized sexual practices of his admirers, some of whom he travels to meet and some of whom offer him gifts and business advice. From the very beginning, he tells elaborate lies to hide what he is doing, and when he is afraid of getting caught, he arranges to leave the country. By the time he is eighteen, of course, he personally is no longer in demand by his subscribers, who can find much better-­looking adult performers elsewhere, but he keeps his site going by recruiting others. He becomes an adult child-­pornographer. Eichenwald tricks him into a meeting by posing as a paying customer. Berry suspects a cop but is eventually persuaded to meet Eichenwald, though under false pretenses. Eichenwald, who is looking to cut a deal for a good story at this meeting, reveals his identity as a reporter and threatens Berry with exposure and arrest. By betraying his own subscribers and telling all to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Congress, and Larry King, Berry can make a clean break with his criminal business and enjoy immunity from prosecution, and he and Eichenwald can win prizes, make money, do interviews and lectures, and be canonized as media saints by Oprah Winfrey. Both the optimistic and the cynical versions of this narrative cling as best they can to the available facts, such as they were and are. On Oprah’s message board there was mostly praise for Berry, his courage, and his virtue, but there were also numerous remarks about his skill as a grinning “con-­artist” and “camwhore.” I have no evidence of the true identities or motives of these anonymous commentators, but they cover a lot of ground that Oprah did not. When last I visited her message boards at www.oprah.com in May 2006, her interview had already attracted 1,325 messages, but they appear now to have been taken down. The reader had to wait for #11 cpotans before any doubt was cast on Berry: “What we have done essentially is told every teenager across the world that they are not accountable for their actions if they claim they were naive.” #59 aeroguy87, who claimed to be eighteen, had been camwhoring for four or five years and felt it was wrong, but added that being liked is “a nice feeling when you’re lonely.” #62 and #100 were not buying it. Then #116 trishwms spelled out his or her suspicions in detail: “I think he knew all along what he was doing, got busted, went to Mexico to protect and expand his business with the help of his scumbag father, got busted there by this reporter and decided to play ‘victim.’” When the suspicions start to thicken with #302’s query about a movie deal, #367 fan2fan stepped in to observe that only a pedophile would attack Justin. Later, on January 8, 2008, a message appeared online osten-

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sibly from Tim Richards, another business partner whose credibility has been undermined by his imprisonment for sexual misconduct in connection with Berry. The message alleges that Berry falsified ages, including his own, and claimed on his sites that his performers were over eighteen: “Justin’s Paypal account wasn’t created until July 2002, at the time Justin was 16 years old. The first member of Justin’s commercial websites didn’t join until October 2003 when Justin was 17 years old. This website advertised Justin as an 18 year old male living in Mexico.”15 Contradiction begat still more fascination, including mine. Berry was juicier than ever. Some commentators were adept at pursuing both narratives at once, even in the Times shortly after it published its editors’ doubts: “I want to believe that this is a story of redemption, but Mr. Berry doesn’t speak with the authority of a convert, and Mr. Eichenwald doesn’t seem to have interviewed him with enough skepticism.”16 In his testimony before Congress, Berry said that he will not “personally attempt to avoid responsibility” for his actions, even though his entire testimony was offered in exchange for immunity from prosecution. He goes on to say, “While I did not comprehend the magnitude of what was happening when I was 13, as I grew older, I progressively became corrupted and acted in shameful ways. Still, I repeatedly attempted to pull away from this sick business. But, each time, I fell back into this criminal world that had first seduced me, and eventually controlled me.” As if by the mere hydraulic force of paradox, his maturity and his status as an honors student become evidence of his childlike helplessness. The more intelligent he became, the more insidious the predators must have been to have controlled such a smart boy so completely. They pay him compliments, send him gifts and money, rent him an apartment, and amuse him, and this is all further evidence of their profound cruelty and coercion. He credits his mother for using “all the latest child protective software” and even taking away his keyboard occasionally. “But she was no match for the child predators,” he testified, “who worked hard to make sure my child porn shows continued.” By this point in the testimony he has not only disavowed responsibility but also disavowed any hint of personal agency or sexual interest. Even the U.S. government is no match for the power of the pedophiles: he goes on to criticize the Department of Justice for its irresponsibility in not protecting him. At no point in his ordeal does he seem to grasp the extraordinary power of the off-­switch on his webcam until he has the backing of the FBI. Nor does he call on his mother or the police to rescue him. Nor does he turn for succor to the stepfather and sister, who are reported to have been members of the household but are mys-

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teriously unnamed and irrelevant in every published version of the story. Rather, Berry cleverly manages to skip school, amass expensive computer hardware, and hide in his bedroom in plain sight of his strangely clueless family; then to escape to Mexico when his cover is blown at school and he is harassed with impunity by peers, who are evidently more adept with computers than his mother and the FBI; then to secure help from his father, not to rescue him from this “sick business” but to help him expand it and procure other prostitutes. He is nothing if not cunning and resourceful, but the narrative of innocence corrupted has an explanation even for that. Only the pure and heroic goodness evident in Eichenwald’s messages online could snap Berry out of this bizarre spell of robotic obedience to strange men online with suspicious motives, but not of course because the reporter was himself a strange man online with suspicious motives. The narrative trajectory of the original Times article is simple and moral to the point of being folklore: innocence is corrupted and redeemed, villains are vanquished, and a hero is triumphant. The tabloid melodrama of the style should have put any respectable editor on alert. In a standard practice of moral panic, Eichenwald misleadingly uses loaded terms such as pedophile and predator to make Berry seem prepubescently young and his clients coercive. The American Psychiatric Association wisely reserves the term pedophile for adults, at least five years older than the child, who have a sexual preference for prepubescent children. It also generally saves the term sexual predator only for especially violent and coercive persons, as do many vice laws. This way, even though the APA pathologizes all such people, it avoids a tone of moral panic and allows for different degrees of vulnerability and harm. As Eichenwald’s predators are exaggeratedly villainous, so is his description of Berry equally sentimental. “That year, he was a gangly 13-­year-­old with saucer eyes and brown hair that he often dyed blond,” he writes of Berry, the pubescent child whose innocence here is compromised by just a hint of duplicitous vanity, vulnerable to all that “grooming” of victims the predators allegedly do. The “saucer eyes,” those empty and shallow dishes, answer to James R. Kincaid’s description of the standard erotic innocent of American media fantasy: atop a tiny body is a big blank face with big empty eyes—an ideal screen for projection.17 “Justin’s desk became a high-­tech playhouse,” Eichenwald writes, drawing an analogy that would evoke a much younger child, not a teenager. As if in figural anticipation of the money shot, Berry’s clients “oozed compliments” like one big slavering Fagin. Just as the self-­effacing Eichenwald intervenes as a character in the

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plot and starts referring to himself as “this reporter” instead of the unintentionally allegorical moniker “The Times,” a new chapter begins, “A Look behind the Secrecy.” Meaning the predators’ secrecy or his own? We read on: “In June, Justin began communicating online with someone who had never messaged him before. The conversations involved many questions, and Justin feared his new contact might be an F.B.I. agent.” Is he the good hunter or evil predator? Why does he use the name “Justin” and never “Mr. Berry,” even when referring to the Justin who is legally an adult? The robotic child once again just obeys, and we learn that he secretly wanted to get arrested, thereby offering himself up for rescue but leaving his passivity as limply intact as ever. The cunning man-boy who made all that money now seems to vanish, and suddenly, very suddenly, he becomes the lost child again now that he has come of age: “At one point, asked what he wanted to accomplish in his life, Justin pondered for a moment and replied that he wanted to make his mother and grandmother proud of him.” Presumably not by taking his shirt off and being a crackerjack camwhore, and so he must be ready now for confession and rebirth, a return to a wise mother, even a grandmother. A melodramatic sense of triumph and destiny reassures us that the good hunters are hard at work: “‘The kids are in the house!’ Justin shouted into the phone, answering a question posed by one of the agents,” Eichenwald writes, and then, “As agents approached the house, Justin knew he had little time left. He decided to confront the man who had hurt him for so long.” Just in time, Justin the Just! Through an identification with the FBI agents and Jesus, Eichenwald the good hunter becomes Eichenwald the good father. He attempts to shed his identification with the predators and displace the absent, abusive, or wicked fathers in Berry’s life—not just the clients, but also the stepfather and especially the father in Mexico. Evidently without fear that he was implicating himself in an illicit act or demonstrating his lack of journalistic objectivity, he personalized his first discovery of Berry’s Web site: “‘Nobody could look at this image knowing that it was a porn site and not conclude this is about child porn,’ Eichenwald testified in a related criminal case in Michigan. ‘It was an image of a 14-­year-­old boy, somebody who was clearly underage. Somebody who, in truth, and this was a very important thing, he looked a lot like my oldest son, who was 13 at the time.’”18 The good hunter/father ends the article on an especially mawkish note: “On their final day together, Justin’s mother drove him to the airport. Hugging him as they said goodbye, she said that the son she once knew had finally returned. Then, as tears welled

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in her eyes, Justin’s mother told him that she and his grandmother were proud of him.” This plot is already familiar to us from “Little Red Riding Hood.” Clueless Mother lets Kid trot off alone with Berry-­basket into deep, dark, digital forest (let’s call it the Eichenwald). At end of Internet path, Kid looks around for Elusive Grandmother but gets eaten alive by online Predators. Hunter Father emerges mysteriously from scary Eichenwald and rescues Kid from belly of Predators. Kid, now wiser, is returned by Hunter Father to Clueless Mother and Elusive Grandmother, the end. What makes the story new, however, is the vehicle of the Internet. Its volatile erotics enjoys a special intimacy with the gothic, fairy-­tale ambiguity of the sexual child, who embodies innocence and defies it at the same time. As Berry says in an interview, parents should “throw webcams into the trash,” otherwise “you’re letting the pedophiles into your kids’ bedrooms.”19 The technology itself seems to be the true culprit here, or at least the culprit that parents can get their hands on. Like the ultimate pedophile, it assaults children in their very bedrooms despite the anxious gaze of their own parents, and like a child, the Internet needs monitoring and censorship to be safe. Like these suspect figures, the Internet is enflamed by a sadistic id disguised by innocence and helpfulness. Childhood is a relatively recent invention that depends on a certain unequal distribution of knowledge, and with the Internet that distribution is more confused than ever. Making the Internet safe usually means passing laws to make it safe for either commerce or childhood innocence and ignorance. Nevertheless, despite all the laws worldwide against producing, possessing, downloading, and distributing child pornography, despite FBI entrapment schemes online, despite the criminalization in some countries even of pornographic cartoons, manga, and erotic descriptions about children, real or imaginary, the Internet effectively legalized child pornography by rendering the laws against it extremely difficult to enforce, since digital images can replicate and cross borders and jurisdictions in tremendous quantity and with unprecedented ease. Even a child can do it, thereby calling the distinction between child and predator into further question. As Nathan remarks, child pornography by children is a “new growth area” for the online porn industry, now that children have bountiful access to the Internet, webcams, and smartphones with digital cameras.20 Most of these child child-­pornographers, however, are not looking to profit from the industry but rather to keep in touch with their friends, amuse one another, or seduce people of whatever age; unfortunately, their artwork is still often

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actionable, still easily transmittable to other people, and still available to be sold by someone else on a porn site without permission. These children have become the boldest producers of child pornography, ironically on the very gadgets that a parent may have given them to ensure their safety and further their education. The children are also doing it to assault and humiliate one another. Hence, the child camwhore scandal has been upstaged by a recent deluge of articles about cyberbullying, especially when it appears to drive schoolchildren and college students to suicide after they have been harassed online by accusations of homosexuality, sluttiness, or sexually transmitted disease. The topic has been in the news throughout the past decade, and Justin Berry, by his own admission, was both a traumatized victim and a vicious perpetrator of such harassment when he was in his teens. Curiously, it seems not to have troubled Eichenwald that the only perpetrators of genuine coercion and blackmail online in his article are Berry and some of his high school peers. The cyberbullies at Berry’s school, like Berry himself, could still be excused from responsibility for their aggression. News coverage on cyberbullying could easily appeal to the usual melodrama about villains who attack defenseless children, if only the villains were not so often the same age as the victims. The logic of erotic innocence demands that the child’s every crime must be a symptom of corruption by an adult, just as the child’s every accomplishment must be credited to inspiration by an adult. The adult pedophiles and predators are almost always irredeemable villains in the eyes of psychiatry, popular media, and the law. They are dismissed as hopelessly paraphilic and notoriously wily and ruthless. Depending on which authority we consult, adults who have sex with “minors” deserve to be executed or castrated, or at least imprisoned, medicated, counseled, and closely watched for the rest of their lives, due to their well-­documented tendency to recidivism and denial of wrongdoing. The juvenile cyberbully and online sex offender, however, has a shot at innocence. Digital technology is very good at keeping records and amassing evidence, thereby making innocence even more difficult to establish. Is the child young enough? Is there proof of past vicitimization? Has there been psychiatric analysis or treatment? What has the child been typing, texting, sexting, e-­mailing, uploading, downloading, recording, and transmitting? What does it all mean? Rare is the judge or journalist who surrenders to ambiguity. The suicide of Tyler Clementi has proven especially challenging in this regard. Clementi was eighteen years old and just starting at Rutgers University when his roommate, with the help of another student,

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allegedly sought to bully and humiliate him by recording a more or less erotic encounter between him and another male and then streaming the encounter live on the Internet. Soon afterward, Clementi jumped to his death from a bridge. The alleged perpetrators are about the same age that he was, and so they hover in moral ambiguity on the legal cusp between childhood innocence and adult responsibility. Was it a prank and an unfortunate coincidence, or was it a vicious hate crime and invasion of privacy worthy of a prison sentence? Was the encounter adequately sexual, were the alleged perpetrators being genuinely homophobic, was suicide a credible response or even foreseeable as one? All these questions are debated in light of another question: were the alleged perpetrators even old enough to be taken seriously as perpetrators? The child sex offender in particular brings the melodramatic simplicity of this narrative to an impasse that demands everyone’s attention, sympathy, and concern. The narrative has to acknowledge danger while keeping erotic innocence and helplessness intact, and so it usually offers one of two options: the child was corrupted or abused by adults or the child was born that way. These options could elicit sympathy for adult offenders, too, but will never redeem them. The first option depends on our belief in a statistically dubious “circle of abuse” by which abused children abuse children. Berry rode to judicial immunity on this option with evidence that his father physically assaulted him and lascivious adults later groomed him to be a child pornographer. The second option generally comes to the conclusion that the child is genetically a sociopath, and so no one, especially not an adult, is at fault. The student perpetrators of school shootings are the most notorious beneficiaries of this logic, and David Cullen’s sympathetic account of the perpetrators in the 1999 Columbine massacre is an exemplary demonstration of this logic.21 It also applies to the etiology of homosexuality, for those who feel children need to have an excuse when they grow up gay, and the popular response to the Columbine massacre is also an exemplary instance of the sociopath coded as gay. Even before the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, in which wireless digital phones rendered telecommunication possible and impossible, the shootings at Columbine demonstrated the ubiquity of digital technology and its important contribution to helping children be both safer and deadlier. Mobile phones allowed students still trapped in the school to announce their whereabouts to police, though it did not always save them. Surveillance cameras intended to promote safety and order became instead helpless digital witnesses to the panic and slaughter. Internet Web sites gave one of the perpetrators, Eric

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Harris, a forum for his homicidal rants and an easy resource for weapons, just as his digital videocamera left behind evidence of both his charm and his aggression. The stakes in these two options are high, given the frequency of school shootings and other violence and harassment perpetrated on young students by one another. Moreover, the statistics on the number of children who claim to have been, to one degree or another, cyberbullied generally range from 20 percent to just over 50 percent. In light of new statistics and media coverage on child-­initiated violence, harassment, and sexual activity, this past decade has witnessed a loss of faith in the embattled fantasy of children as innocents. According to the most recent overview of research on the subject, about a third of sexual offenses against children are perpetrated by teenagers, the vast majority of them male. If these offenders are required to register as such on a publicly accessible Web site, complete with their names, addresses, and criminal histories, then they themselves risk becoming easy targets of harassment and assault.22 Much of what Eichenwald reports about Berry, if true, would not be generalizable to the larger population of teenagers. Adolescents are not especially vulnerable online or naive about the Internet, posting personal information online is not all that risky, social networking sites are also not all that risky, adults who are sexually soliciting minors online are almost never pedophiles and almost never violent, and juvenile sex offenders have exceptionally low rates for multiple offenses and recidivism. This information is drawn from a 2008 study, the most complete psychological overview currently available, and relies on law enforcement records from 2004 and other data. It takes Eichenwald’s article about Berry into account, though only to say it raises further issues for research, presumably because there is little data on webcam use by teenagers.23 In the absence of reliable data, moral panic is the usual response. When we see Berry in his home office, surrounded by all his computer keyboards and monitors, working his Web site and his PayPal account and professing impossible innocence, we find a new turn of the screw that even Henry James never imagined: the “children who know” are not only seductive and dangerous, they are also now online. Notes 1

See Philip Jenkins, Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet (New York: New York University Press, 2001). Jenkins, a prolific commentator on “moral panics,” including books on the representation of child molesters and pedophile priest scandals, finally met his match with Internet child pornography and wrote Beyond Tolerance

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in much the same urgent and panicky tone that he frequently criticizes in others. For him, the evidence he has gathered about the extent and violence of such pornography provides a valid reason for moral panic. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982). This survey clearly suffers from a conflict of interest, since it was conducted by a business that would profit from the results. Norton Family Online, “Kids’ Top 100 Searches of 2009,” http://onlinefamilyinfo.norton.com/articles/kidsearches_2009.php (accessed January 30, 2011). All references to this article are quoted from Kurt Eichenwald, “Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World,” New York Times, December 19, 2005, www .nytimes.com/2005/12/19/national/19kids.ready.html?_r=1. The New York Times made five brief videos focused on this interview. I focus here primarily on the second, “Interview with Justin Berry: They Offered Money,” which may be accessed at http://video.nytimes.com/video/2005/12/16/us/1194817123164/they-­ offered-­money.html?scp=3&sq=justin%20berry&st=cse (accessed January 30, 2011). Sexual Exploitation of Children over the Internet: What Parents, Kids, and Congress Need to Know about Child Predators, hearings before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, 109th Congress (2006) (testimony of Justin Berry). According to the Michigan Department of Corrections, www.state.mi.us/mdoc/asp/ otis2profile.asp?mdocNumber=641321 (accessed January 30, 2011). He has already served the sentence for an additional conviction on a misdemeanor. On another note, there has been an official investigation into the failure of staff to respond appropriately to the severe beating he received from his cellmates shortly after his sentencing. Kenneth Gourlay, personal correspondence with author, May 9, 2011. The photograph currently appears uncredited, for example, on Facebook, Abitabout, and Justin Berry’s entry on Wikipedia (accessed January 30, 2011). In personal correspondence with me dated May 9, 2011, Kenneth Gourlay explains, “The photograph was never intended to be more than a snapshot during a vacation visit. It was taken using my digital camera in September, 2003. Justin’s father, Knute Berry, snapped the shutter.” He adds, “This photo was taken at the end of a trip I took to Mazatlan, Mexico, to visit Justin. I don’t know what others say about the relationship between the two of us, but at least at the time of the trip we were on good terms and considered each other to be friends. He suggested I visit him there so he could show off his new home, tour the town with me, and discuss some business ideas.” Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), 20. Justin Berry, www.justinberry.tv/kids.html (accessed January 30, 2011). A roster of Debbie Nathan’s commentaries on Kurt Eichenwald may be accessed at Debbie Nathan, http://debbienathan.com/?s=eichenwald&sbutt=Go (accessed January 30, 2011). Debbie Nathan, “New York Times Reporter Was a Member of an Illegal Underage Porn Site, Claims He Was Only ‘Posing as Online Predator,’” Counterpunch, September 14, 2007, www.counterpunch.org/nathan09142007.html. David France, “Saving Justin Berry,” New York Magazine, October 28, 2007, available at http://nymag.com/guides/money/2007/39957/.

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17 18 19

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Kurt Eichenwald, interview with Oprah Winfrey, Oprah, February 2006. The letter was published online by Queer Planet, a news organization that has been consistently critical of Justin Berry and Kurt Eichenwald. www.queerplanet.net/news/ usa/a-­letter-­from-­casey-­00001.shtml (accessed January 30, 2011). From a letter to the editor written on January 16, 2006, in response to a New York Times article from the previous day on the ethical questions surrounding Eichenwald’s involvement with Berry. Douglas Harrison, “Other Voices: But What News Goes in That News Hole? Justin Berry’s Story,” New York Ttimes, February 5, 2006, http://query .nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E3DD173EF936A35751C0A9609C8B63. James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). France, “Saving Justin Berry.” Quoted from the final clip, “What Should Parents Do?” in the New York Times series of videos about Justin Berry, http://video.nytimes.com/video/2005/12/16/us/ 1194817105847/what-­should-­parents-­do-­.html?scp=5&sq=justin%20berry&st=cse (accessed January 30, 2011). Debbie Nathan, “Why I Need to See Child Pollo-­graphy,” July 12, 2007, http://debbie nathan.com/2007/07/why-­i-­need-­to-­see-­child-­pollo-­graphy/. As the odd title suggests, the article plays on the slangy double entendre of words like cock, chick, and chicken in relation to her sardonic discussion of her ethical quandaries over a picture of a naked rooster that may be shockingly below the age of consent. David Cullen, Columbine (New York: Twelve, 2009). Maggie Jones, “How Can You Distinguish a Budding Pedophile from a Kid with Real Boundary Problems?” New York Times, July 22, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/ magazine/22juvenile-­t .html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=maggie%20boundary%20issues&st =cse. Janis Wolak et al., “Online ‘Predators’ and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment,” American Psychologist 68.2 (2008): 111–28.

Matthew Tinkcom ​“You’ve

got to get on to get off ”: Shortbus and the Circuits of the Erotic

Two events open the discussion that this essay

proposes: One: A friend recently told me with a grain of pleasure in his voice that “Grindr is coming to Blackberry!” This turned out to mean that Grindr, an application designed for iPhones that allows individuals to locate others of similar interests— specifically, men who seek sexual encounters with other men—was reported to become available to owners of Blackberry cellular devices. The users involved, like my friend, seem to be comparatively affluent urban men seeking sex—but also friendship and romance—with other men, and the possibility for finding their location is quite specific: the technology involved uses GPS (global positioning system) to inform the subscriber that another individual can be as close as one foot away and to see his self-­generated user profile. Two: On the morning I sat down to begin writing this essay, I noticed in the corner of my computer screen a message on Skype, the Web-­facilitated video conferencing platform, from someone bearing the profile name “sexysearch2010.” Sexysearch2010 was offering the services of a Web site titled www.matchdate.com The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:3, Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-1275842 © 2011 Duke University Press

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and sent me an instant message suggesting that it was an “Easy New way to find FRIENDS and SEX PARTNERS!,” had “Millions of members ONLINE NOW!,” and I could “Create a FREE profile in Seconds!” As alluring as all of this sounded—it was, after all, apparently easy, free, and would put me in touch with millions of others—I turned my attention to writing but paused for a moment to ask myself what I had done to solicit this offer. My conclusion, and one that has not changed much, is that, flattering as sexysearch2010’s message was, my inclusion in the apparent sexual paradise that is the world wide Web was sponsored solely by the fact that I was simply on the Web and, more specifically, had my Skype application open. These moments usher this essay to a discussion of the manner in which digital communications media have informed the discourses and narratives of sexuality, and I mention them here to suggest that the ubiquity of digital media for sexuality is rivaled only by the fact that any positive outcome for such media is largely ignored in both popular and scholarly imaginations about it. It is as if the sex life of the digital does not exist but as an array of demonized forms—from criminal charges against adolescent users of mobile cellular devices accused of “sexting” to the instant messages at the heart of the scandalous sexualities of politicians, culture industry celebrities, and sports stars, to the Web-­distributed sex videos of Paris Hilton and John Edwards (not in the same production—not yet, at least). The proliferation of sexual discourses, images, sounds, and narratives on the Web and through cellular channels in the past two decades has altered the terms in which we think about the meanings of sexuality and gender, but rather than fulfill our expectations—largely made possible by Michel Foucault’s epistemic-­shifting call to understand sexuality as a series of disclosures that are tightly imbricated with practices of power—digital sexualities seem to be practices of concealment that for the most part appear within the older media forms such as film, television, and print (themselves rapidly transformed by digital technologies but still central institutions unlikely to disappear in the near term) as unspeakable. In this regard, digital sexualities and the possibilities afforded by the technological innovations of the past twenty years—such as anonymity, decorporalization, self-­invention and reinvention, randomness—are largely disregarded by older “dominant” media forms and their subtending industries except as pathological, and few conventional mediations such as cinema, television, and print media seek to account for the sexualities of the digital in nonpathologized ways. The implications of this, I would

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argue, are that interested subjects put digital mediations to uses unknown by all but them while the larger world seems satisfied to think that digitally mediated sexualities end largely in violence and demise. A recent comic exchange on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock illuminates this aspect of the popular imagination, particularly as it delineates the possibilities for women in the digital moment. Liz (Tina Fey) phones her boss, Jack (Alec Baldwin), and asks if, under the influence of narcotics given to her during a visit to the dentist, she posted an ad on Craigslist soliciting a massage. Jack informs her that she indeed did do such, whereupon a knock is heard at her apartment door, and Fey’s character responds by growling in a masculinized voice, “You’re too late—I already killed her,” to which a disappointed male voice behind the door responds in a disappointed sigh. This essay, then, asks whether it is possible for digitally mediated sexualities to function as anything but a category of negation; that is, whether the digital sexual is anything but an ostensible aberration within a heterosexualized and monogamous sexual regime in the current popular culture. Further, the digital sexual is meant here to include both those sexualities facilitated by digital mediation—such as the Craigslist “hookup,” which the 30 Rock joke acknowledges—and the representation of such activities. I would argue that this is seldom the case because such digital sexualities make possible the idea of a heteronormative monogamous sexuality, in which all other sexualities are excluded from being represented or narrated. In order to explore this claim, I propose to read a significant recent film about sexuality against the terms of its digital supplements. This film, John Cameron Mitchell’s 2006 Shortbus, seeks to rethink the terms by which we represent contemporary sexualities through an explicitness of its imagery. However, by attending to the digital media that appear, often momentarily, within Shortbus, I argue that the film’s graphic depictions of sexuality—its “full frontal” images, its framing of genital sexualities and inclusion of oral, vaginal, and anal penetration, and its depiction of “perverse” sexualities (a quaint term, I realize) such as bondage and flogging— are organized by the manner in which they confirm more typical narratives of sexuality and gender at the expense of those digital sexual modalities that the film seems able to neglect. It should be clear that I am not necessarily validating what I am calling the narratives of digital sexuality so much as I am wondering why they are hardly able to be narrated in the first place. Further, this particular film’s explicit depictions of genital sexuality distract a critical examination from the sexualities of the digital camera, the Web,

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and the cellular device because Mitchell’s film is concerned with female orgasm, a phenomenon apparently unrelated—at least in his account—to digital media and communications technologies. In this regard, the technologies for which “the digital” functions as a shorthand term and which include an immense array of material innovations, social practices, and institutions—the communications networks of fiber-­optic cable, wireless broadcast and satellite distribution, computer hosts and servers, graphical interface designs, recording and playback devices, cellular “smartphone” technologies and their applications but also the technologies of language, the body, and social practices of power— all converge frequently around the commonsense category of “sex,” but in point of fact it is male sexuality, and largely same-­sex male sexuality, that moves through the networks of the digital. It is worth pausing to consider the manner in which the commonsense ground for this immense variety of techne renders the film’s fictitious world recognizable by the ways the characters interact with contemporary digital devices—cameras, microphones, cellular devices, personal computers, the Web—in a matter-­of-­fact manner. Despite the sense of the film’s diegesis as conventionally realistic, Shortbus pivots between a sense of “real” sex as it involves the characters’ bodies in sexual acts and the seemingly supplemental function of digital technology to make such ostensibly real sex possible. This essay, though, reads the two as not dispersed into categories of the “real” and the “virtual” but as mutually constituting—the digital’s fragmented presence in the film suggests something more generally about how emerging digital technologies allow older narratives of sexuality to abide while new sexualities of the Web and the cellular proliferate in less tangible ways. Further, the more established and recognizable sexualities are grounded in the female body—and its ostensible compulsion to be orgasmic—while queer male sexualities appear to ricochet around digital networks and signal their presence in partial and momentary fashion. The film’s seven primary figures stand in for a variety of sexual identities and modalities that at moments become stereotypes of affluent, well-­ educated, fashionable, and sophisticated inhabitants of the cosmopolitan space. Their common problem—and it is worth underscoring that the film treats sexuality as a problem—is that they each fail to have their sexual desire coincide with the discourses that might reveal and provoke a kind of truth about themselves. More pointedly, the narrative project of the film emerges as one in which they attempt to discover the language through which they can understand the relation of their sexuality to their work—

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each figure experiences an alienation from her or his labor because each one cannot bring to light some perceived shortcoming in the autobiography of her or his sexuality. Conjoined to the gendered nature of bodies and the digital—where female sexuality resides primarily within the body, while male (largely queer) sexuality finds its prostheses in the digital—new communication modes express their mobile and “morphous” nature through their ability to move across the threshold between labor and (sexual) leisure. The film follows two couples and three single people: James (Paul Dawson) and Jamie (PJ DeBoy), Sofia (Sook-­Yin Lee) and Rob (Raphael Barker), Severin (Lindsay Beamish), Ceth (Jay Brannan), and Caleb (Peter Stickles), also known as the Stalker. Jamie and James, a male couple, are depicted as unevenly matched in the pleasure they take in their domesticity and sexuality. Jamie appears to live off the proceeds of having been a child actor in a network sitcom, while James is a video artist and former hustler who is dependent on Jamie and wonders if their bond reenacts the exploitation he felt during his time as a sex worker. Sofia and Rob, a heterosexual international and interracial couple (Sofia describes herself at one point in the film as Chinese Canadian), seem to enjoy a satisfying sexual bond but, it emerges, are divided by an apparent secret within their sex life that would spoil their fantasies of themselves as well adjusted: Sofia has never experienced an orgasm, a fact she has withheld from Rob and which impinges on her professional life as a couples therapist. Severin, Ceth, and Caleb are the single figures. Severin supports herself financially through sex work as a punk-­styled dominatrix, mostly to a wealthy young man whom she describes as a “trust-­fund Muppet.” Her amateur artistic efforts, which consist of taking Polaroid photographs of random events and writing epigrammatic comments on them, only seem to remind her of just how far she is from supporting herself as an artist. Her sex work is beginning to emerge as just that: work. Meanwhile, Caleb lurks in the background of these narratives, living across the alley from James and Jamie and secretly spectating by way of telescope on their domestic life and following them as they go about their lives in the city (in scenes eliminated from the feature release of the film but included on the DVD supplements, we learn that he is an aide to the George W. Bush White House charged with supervising the president’s daughters, a job that curiously leaves him with enough time to spy on his neighbors). Shortbus’s narrative divides itself into three acts that crosscut among the seven characters and their different stories to have them arrive at the Shortbus sex club. The first act opens with James and Jamie as they enter

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into couples counseling; they are contemplating “opening up” their relationship, allowing themselves to seek sexual relations with other men. Their sex therapist—or, as she huffily declaims several times in the film, “relationship counselor”—is Sofia who, because she has never experienced an orgasm, feels her own marriage to have become fraught. During their first counseling session, Sofia reveals to James and Jamie in a comic exchange that she is “pre-­orgasmic,” spurring Jamie to awkwardly ask, “Does that mean you’re about to have one?” On the advice of James and Jamie, Sofia visits the Shortbus club one evening—and thus opens the first of the three sequences set in the club—where she is greeted by Justin Bonds, who explains that the club’s name means that its guests are sexually “gifted and challenged.” During a subsequent conversation in the Pussy Palace—a room in the club for a women’s discussion group—Sofia meets Severin. James and Jamie subsequently appear at the club and meet Ceth, a single man in pursuit of sexual liaisons, while Caleb follows them to the club, where he continues to watch them in the background. After this first sequence at the club, we subsequently see the characters’ attempts to redefine their sexual practices as a way of answering the dissatisfaction they feel more generally about their lives: James and Jamie invite Ceth back to their apartment, where the three of them have sex in a scene that concludes with James playfully singing “The Star Spangled Banner” into Ceth’s naked ass while Caleb observes, as usual, from his apartment. By virtue of their meeting at Shortbus, Sofia and Severin become friends and take to meeting daily at a “sensory deprivation center” in New York, where they float in a darkened tank of water and confess their personal and sexual biographies to each other. The middle portion of the film brings Sofia again to Shortbus, this time with a sexual experiment meant to enliven her bond with her husband: Sofia wears a vibrator controlled by a remote control. This she gives to Rob in order for him to stimulate her from afar, but Rob absentmindedly loses the remote, a failure of attention that eventually brings about an orgasm, just not for Sofia: after bumping into Severin in the club, Sofia and Severin converse and begin to kiss and caress each other. As they embrace, Sofia’s vibrator accidentally activates and begins to stimulate Severin, who eventually has an orgasm, while Sofia helplessly and resentfully looks on. The vibrator then begins to activate more powerfully and without pause, driving Sofia into convulsive anger, which, at the sequence’s conclusion, leads her to rush from the club, pull the egg-­shaped contraption from between her

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legs, hurl it to the pavement, and ragefully smash it to pieces in front of the club’s patrons, who have gathered to watch. During this same sequence at Shortbus, James and Severin are seen playing a game of truth-­or-­dare with a group of strangers; they are dared to enter a closet for the ostensible goal of making out, but this encounter finds James tearfully confessing to Severin that he, too, has been a sex worker and that his current sadness is brought about by the fact that “I look back at things I wrote when I was twelve years old, and I still want the same things today.” With this melancholic observation in mind, James leaves the club and attempts to take his own life: at the health club where he works, he sets up his video camera by the pool and then swallows a handful of pills, wraps his head in a plastic bag, and submerges himself in the water. With melodramatic timing, Caleb (the Stalker) appears, pulls him from the water, and resuscitates him, leaving before paramedics arrive but taking a moment to write his phone number and e-­mail address in reverse writing on James’s face. In the film’s final scenes, the characters have shifted into new couples, pairings in which they are able to achieve insight into their sexualities, allowing for personal reinvention and social realignment. James awakens in the hospital to discover Caleb’s phone number on his face; after phoning him, he goes to Caleb’s apartment, where he learns of the latter’s long-­standing surveillance of him and Jamie from the photographs of them pinned to Caleb’s wall. James confesses that his attempt to kill himself was brought about by the fact that he recognizes some menace in Jamie’s affection for him. He comments, “I see it [i.e., Jamie’s affection] all around me, but it stops at my skin and I can’t let it inside. It’s always been like that—he loves me as hard as the people who treated me like shit.” In saying this, he euphemizes his aversion for anal penetration by other men; Caleb responds by taking him to bed and penetrating him. The new pairing of Jamie and Ceth, meanwhile, brings them to Jamie’s apartment, where they try to learn what has become of James since he left the club. They open his laptop and view, for the first time, James’s farewell video, which he has left on his hard drive. Meanwhile, without explanation Severin is seen in a hotel room for a sexual encounter with Rob, whom she beats with a whip and at whom she repeatedly screams, with apparently redemptive force and insight, “Look at me.” These events are crosscut with the film’s climax: Sofia finally manages to have an orgasm. Seen counseling a couple in her office, this time look-

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ing disheveled and exhausted, Sofia is, through a point-­of-­view layering of shots, transported in a fantasy that lands her on a hyperchromatic beach, where she is seen masturbating. In an extreme close-­up of her face that coincides with James’s penetrative bliss and Severin’s liberatory demands to be seen, she appears to achieve a state of sexual ecstasy that is so powerful it brings the city’s power grid down and renders dark the entire urban space of New York. The coda to this transformative erotic display finds a single window in the city lighted; we learn that this is Shortbus, where candles are being lit and where the characters meet one last time in a rousing musical number—sung first as a ballad by Justin, then by the ensemble as a march— appropriately titled “We All Take It in the End.” Sofia’s ecstatic face is seen giving way to the film’s final shot of the lights coming on across the city. What is purportedly unconventional about Shortbus is not only that it wants to offer its audience a narrative of “positive” sexuality—Mitchell describes the film as a response to what he sees as the negative depictions of the sexual iconography of recent European hard-­core narrative films— but that its most explicit images are staged as comic. (The ludic play of these images, though, earned the film a UR rating from the Motion Picture Association of America.) After an opening shot that moves the viewer in mock-­aerial fashion across a fantastic rendering of New York as a kind of child’s model, Shortbus cuts between shots that depict its characters in sexually explicit images and sounds. James, alone in the apartment he shares with Jamie, is seen in the opening shot videotaping himself on a digital camera as he masturbates in the bathtub and then, moving into the living room and engaging in sexual acrobatics, ejaculates into his own face. As this unfolds, Caleb observes James through a telescope, unseen from his window. Simultaneously and in another part of the city, we witness Sofia and Rob sexually romping in their apartment, engaging in a variety of positions for oral and vaginal penetration, while in a hotel room that overlooks the 9/11 Ground Zero site, Severin flogs her wealthy client while engaging in a witty and often cruel repartee that is meant to both demean and excite him. The sequence crosscuts among these figures as some of them—and, more pointedly, the male figures—come to orgasm. This last point thus emerges as the film’s sponsoring problem: the women do not experience orgasmic sexuality with the men in their lives. For Severin, this seems not a problem of the disciplinary pleasure she gives to her client—who is seen ejaculating on a Jackson Pollock–style painting

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in the hotel room—so much as she emerges as a figure who seeks something outside of her sexuality that would take the form of an unalienated bond with another person. Sofia, it emerges, feels herself to be a hypocrite in both her married and her professional lives because she takes advantage of the perception that everyone in contemporary culture enjoys orgasmic pleasure, not least “happily” married women who work as therapists to help others—like Severin’s tricks, also called “clients”—to produce sexual pleasure that they feel themselves compelled to enjoy but unable to achieve. In the first shot in which we see Sofia counseling Jamie and James, she sits in her office in front of a figure on the wall that proclaims in Chinese characters “Help me!” Shortbus, then, depicts her attempts to find such aid and to alleviate her distress at being unable to have an orgasm—or, in the terms that she negotiates with her husband, to have him give her one. In this regard, Shortbus conforms to more typical depictions of sexuality, not least in the arena of hard-­core pornography, where the appearance of a female orgasm is taken as the hallmark of there having been a “real” sexual act performed before the camera and microphone. Linda Williams comments, “While Shortbus does not imitate the form of pornography, it upholds its orgasmic imperative by also seeking solution in orgasm, though nothing quite so mechanical as that achieved in a single sexual act or position.”1 Williams also comments that Shortbus does not figure so much as a form of conventional pornography because it does not maintain “the pattern of hard-­core pornography of the classic era [where] sex is the problem; (more and better) sex is the (simplistic) solution.”2 Within this governing logic of the imperative of the female orgasm, part of the film’s longer narrative arc is that Severin achieves a sexuality in which she is finally seen as a woman who is something more than a sex worker, while for Sofia it becomes crucial that she have an orgasm—by herself—that will paradoxically integrate her into the larger social world. This occurs for Sofia after she has been lectured by Justin, who castigates her for thinking of sexuality in negative terms—he invokes a language that metaphorizes sexuality with the networked and the digital. Having been asked why she cannot achieve orgasm, Sofia comments that there is a “clog in my neural pathways between my brain and my clitoris”; Justin scolds her that she should “think of it as some sort of magical circuit board, a motherboard filled with desire that travels all over the world, that touches you, that touches me, that connects everybody—you just have to find the right connection, the right circuitry.” As he offers this insight, he gestures to the

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scene in front of them at the Shortbus club, where a room full of men and women engage in polymorphous pleasures and in which he encourages Sofia to participate. Remarkable about this exchange is that Justin’s language—“the magical circuit board”—evokes computers and networks while also framing them in the highly mystified terms of an unseen magic that will liberate Sofia from her conventional sexuality and its apparent repressions. Neither she nor Severin, it should be noted, are seen engaging in such magic of the digital. Severin makes photographic images, but they are on Polaroid self-­developing film, which produces singular prints with no negatives for replication and dispersal. In short, the women are unfulfilled because their sexuality is not networked to a technology that would allow them to find a partner with “the right circuitry.” During one of Sofia and Severin’s friendly conversations at the deprivation tank center, Severin reveals a secret that brings her shame: her real name is not Severin but is in fact Jennifer Aniston. Thus, she struggles with the fact that she shares the name of a popular actress, a coincidence that would not only diminish her sexual mystique and make her more conventional but confuse her identity with a name that already circulates through the culture industry networks—that is, her name is already taken. It is, like the digital, iterative: a big no-­no in Shortbus’s versioning of the feminine. Meanwhile, the men in the film are highly technologically savvy. James carries a video camera with him, photographing himself while masturbating and insisting on taping himself at the therapist’s office as he confesses his dissatisfaction with his life with Jamie. These images form the film that becomes his farewell note to Jamie before his attempted suicide. Caleb enjoys a voyeuristic life by spying on his neighbors using a telescope, and he wears a Bluetooth cellular earpiece throughout the film, while Ceth, a young man who enjoys a sexual encounter with James and Jamie, uses a cellular technology called Yenta 650 that allows him to coordinate, by way of GPS technologies, with potential sexual partners. When Jamie attempts to find James after the latter has disappeared from the Shortbus club, he immediately opens his laptop computer to discover any evidence that might lead to James’s whereabouts—and quickly screens the film that James has made for him. Thus, the lives of these male characters involve the nonchalant use of digital recording, playback, and communication technologies that seem remote from the lives of the women. The implication here is that the female characters experience their sexualities as inadequate because they are not, to use Justin’s metaphor, a part of the circuit.

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With this insight, we can examine the film through its masculine digital supplements. Read through the lens of the digital, its sexual narratives become starkly different. The film’s multiple narratives dwell on the primacy of the body and its movement through the city in the comparatively restricted terms that see corporeal presence as confirmation of desire: in short, the attendees come to the Shortbus club because that is their primary way to seek sexual pleasure. While this remains an important venue for intersecting with like-­minded subjects, analyzing the film’s digital modalities reveals the subjects producing themselves through the technologies now omnipresent in everyday life but forestalling the more typical narratives of sexuality and gender that the foregoing discussion has limned. The remainder of this essay, then, examines three digital technologies that appear in Shortbus as being unnarratable: though they appear as ordinary elements of the diegesis (that is, they serve as cinematic props), the digital camera, the Internet, and the cellular smartphone each allow us to exit the generic constraints of the film in its customary dimensions and to see where digital sexualities—the visual iconography of digital photography, the pleasures of Internet pornography, and the sexual networks of the cellular—part ways with the cinematic. James and the Digital Camera If Mitchell seeks for Shortbus to shock its audience, his choice of opening the film with a shot of a naked man photographing himself—first while bathing, then while masturbating—works to his favor. Perhaps no other kind of image challenges regimes of looking and their related organization of desire than the sight of the nude male body, especially a body that pleasures itself, and especially a body that documents such. The optics is worth considering as it relates to the fact that, historically, male bodies have been exempted from depictions of erotic longing within the culture industries. If the desiring gaze has typically been masculinized as it contemplates women’s bodies, the implication is that the male body that beholds the woman in the cinematic and photographic frames is exempt from sexualized representation. It is true that the advent of “postfeminist” imagery of sexualized male bodies has expanded in the past few decades, but only to a point, and one which Mitchell’s camera seeks to press beyond. Thus, if the typical dynamic of sexual looking in cinema has positioned a male spectator who, via the camera, beholds a woman as sexual

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object and goal, James’s trip to the bathtub confuses this dynamic in several ways: first, he beholds himself and thus is a man looking at a male body (which just happens to be his own). Second, he records himself, first through the camera’s viewfinder—locating an identificatory space for the viewer, who can “see” through James’s eyes and thus know, via a character within the film’s diegesis, who is looking. However, James subsequently moves to the living room and positions the camera on a tripod, surrendering the camera’s viewfinder and becoming an object for the camera; we are left with the fact of our own gaze as it looks without the aid of a fictional figure to whom erotic longing can be attributed. The shift to unattributed looking, though, lasts only for a moment because we quickly become aware that Caleb gazes on James’s sexual performance from across the alley. What problem does this reattribution of the gaze—though to another man—answer in the way that Mitchell is here reorganizing the optics of desire? I would suggest that it is the specter of the digital camera—which ultimately will reproduce these images within James’s self-­generated suicide note/video for Jamie—that is distinguished from Caleb’s “direct” visual knowledge of James’s sexuality. Caleb’s experience of looking at and longing for James attaches his desire to the image of James in a way that the multiple digital iterations cannot be said to do or at least do not do in like fashion. What I am calling here an unattributed gaze, Nicholas Rombes has discussed as an “undirected film” or, more properly, a film in which direction becomes confused, as James both organizes the camera to record and then becomes the photographic subject. Rombes argues, “Undirected films—those films where the director is literally absent or where the concept of director control is challenged— are made possible by new technologies, such as smaller, sturdier DV and HD cameras and Global Positioning Systems.”3 In The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), for example—where the actors manufactured the video images and the camera always seemed to be in their possession—the directors gave instruction to the performers in advance of their movement into the woods (where the film was shot); thus, the actors were required both to function as the fictional subjects of the film’s narrative and to manufacture directly the images that become the final product. A similar problem of attribution emerges in the production history for Shortbus. Mitchell cast the film by soliciting potential performers via the Internet; individuals who were interested in participating in the project were required to submit videos of themselves that they thought would

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appeal to the project, and Mitchell reports that he received more than five hundred audition tapes. Those tapes that are available reveal that the successful auditions were not those that solely included explicit sexual depictions but, instead, consisted largely of the subjects discussing their sexual lives and their sexual autobiographies. Bundled with the DVD of the film, these tapes contrast with James’s digital video production to the degree that it would seem that Mitchell sought out performers who were willing to narrate their sexuality, while of course James’s tape fulfills the sense of what Rombes considers to be the primary appeal—and threat—of digital cinema, that of the accident. He writes, “Haunted by the spectre of perfection, there is a tendency in digital media—and cinema especially—to reassert imperfection, flaws, an aura of human mistakes that counter the sense of the chilliness and perfection that the digital is sometimes accused of.”4 Thus we encounter two practices of the digital moving image that emanate from Mitchell’s opening mise-­en-­scène of James: the audition tape in which sexuality is organized through its narration and the spontaneous, accident-­prone sexual self-­videography recorded by James’s camera but whose framing cannot be attributed to anyone—the digital camera continues to record with no human agent as its locus of observation. Thus, the portable digital camera in this sequence reveals the threat of an erotic gaze that is unmonitored because it does not represent anyone in the mise-­en-­scène. This is perhaps an unintended effect of what James Moran has called video’s ontology: “Defenders of video have cited the medium’s primary advantages for its near simultaneity of production and reception; its clean, flexible, and nonlinear editing technologies allowing for greater experimentation; and its potential for unlimited transmission to an indefinite number of receivers.”5 Moran sees the differences between film and video as less about their material and technological substrates than the personal and institutional purposes they serve and asks whether they are “truly the effects of each technology’s unique properties, or are they more likely psychological and ideological connotations associated with each medium’s conventional practices?” Regarding digital video’s accidental and supplemental status, which makes it capable of capturing sexual “events” before they are narrated, Moran’s question draws our attention to the idea that Shortbus frames the sexual representations made possible by digital video in order to retain for itself—as a film—the capacity to narrate what subjects fail or refuse to narrate themselves. James’s orgasm as it is recorded therefore stands starkly in contrast to Sofia’s face in the related sequence in which she is recorded as perform-

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ing orgasm for her husband and for the film and its spectators—and specifically not the video. Unlike James’s performance, which is made for and made possible by the digital, her enactment of pleasure, on the one hand, satisfies the terms of cinematic sexuality—it literally climaxes in the appropriate fashion—and, on the other, turns out to be a simulation that the highly personal digital modes of James’s recordings would refuse. (Of course, the difference between the two performances is also informed by the fact that female orgasm is not as “productive” as that of men: it does not, as Williams has argued, offer the visible evidence of ejaculation in the same way and thus is always capable of being falsified, at least in terms of the requirements of more typical pornography.) However, this would seem to be confirmed by the film’s ultimate demonstration of the “truth” of her orgasm in the final scene: she extinguishes the lights of New York, putting everyone in the dark and depriving them of the visual. James’s digital video climax, by contrast, does not shut the lights off, but in fact ushers the gaze—Caleb’s most specifically—into the intimate space of his home. Rob and Internet Pornography Sofia’s attempts to achieve sexual climax in the film are, if nothing else, earnest: she works with zeal to address this apparent shortcoming in her life, and this devotion that brings about one of the film’s most vivid jokes about the relation of sexuality to home life and domesticity. In the sequence in which she masturbates in the bathroom, dressed in lingerie and softly lit, her focused attempts at this effort are interrupted by her husband’s leisurely and playful enjoyment of Internet pornography. When Sofia hears him playing music loudly, she angrily stomps out, only to find him, grinning, with his eyes fixed on his computer screen, his erect penis in his hand. Their angry exchange about the music results in him shouting at her—apparently without irony—“I’m looking for a job!” “What kind of a job? A handjob?” she responds, and he giggles while she lectures him about the need to clean the house and maintain hygiene and order (that is, if he is not gainfully employed, he should be doing domestic work). Their exchange escalates to a therapeutic screaming session when an edit moves the narrative from Sofia peevishly shouting at Rob to the pair sitting, cross-­legged and opposed to each other. It then emerges in the conversation that Rob’s consumption of Internet pornography is, for him, consolation for the fact that Sofia cannot achieve an orgasm with him. More specifically, Rob asserts that he cannot give her an orgasm, and thus he sees

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himself as unable to contribute to the household economy of income or pleasure. Here, the film’s tagline—“You’ve got to get on to get off ”—drives home the sense that Rob not only “gets off ” by getting on the Internet, but that he “gets off ” from performing his domestic tasks by wasting his time surfing the Internet. The disclosure of Rob’s apparent failure to “give” Sofia an orgasm and his related inability to financially contribute to the household elucidates the language of exchange at the heart of the domestic: all the getting and giving, of income, pleasure, self-­pleasure, insults and compliments, emerges not from Sofia’s dutiful efforts to make sure she is capable of having an orgasm but from Rob’s use of the computer to find an erotics in place of a paying job. Worth noting is that this sequence opens with Sofia’s addressing herself privately in the bathroom mirror before she masturbates; she flirtingly points at herself and fixes her face and body in her gaze as she whispers to herself, “I want you! I want youuuuu!” Thus, two fields of vision compete to hold the erotic looking that takes place in this household, the bathroom mirror that sponsors the hushed positivity of Sofia’s cooing self-­affirmation versus the computer screen that “distracts” Rob from what he could “get” at home: a sense of his diminished value as a husband who can offer his wife neither money to sustain the tacit sense of ownership that operates within the house nor sexual satisfaction. Internet pornography, then, is not coincidental to what Rob and Sofia finally manage to disclose to each other because it so easily and malleably serves to realign his efforts to become a productive employee to being a “wasteful” consumer of illicit images. Rob’s argument to Sofia that he could never “get this on the computer” is true if “this” is physical contact and intimacy but is also untrue if it is about the sense of sexuality as a form of leisure and not, as the language of “giving” orgasms makes clear, labor done in exchange for financial support. The Internet—where information about labor opportunities morphs into sexual imagery that relieves Rob of having to see the sexual dimensions of his marriage to Sofia as a part-­time job—is a form of squandering that the domestic economy of Rob and Sofia’s marriage cannot sustain. In this light, the event I mention at this essay’s opening—of being solicited on Skype and having to conclude that solely by having my Web browser open do I become a digital sexual subject—helps us to understand how the digital sexual supplement is always lurking behind the fact of labor, waiting to morph from the value codings of income into the endless iterations of the erotic on the Web. I interpret this as a kind of excuse for the digital sexual supplement as a coincidence—it is made to appear

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as if it exists by happenstance and is beyond the individual’s control. This helps to make sense of the recent popular news stories about Chatroulette, a Web-­facilitated interface that randomizes videoconferencing between two users. Initial media coverage of this interface emphasized that some visitors to Chatroulette’s Web site engaged in exhibitionism and inaugurated sexually themed chat in the accompanying instant-­messaging windows. The major news channels—from the big three television networks to the all-­news cable channels—described the pool of users engaged in such activities as almost entirely comprised of men. Although there is no confirmation of how often such behavior might actually have taken place, the news media were obliquely announcing that Chatroulette provided the technology by which anyone might go looking for real-­time videographic sexual interaction with others and that the ideal participant was probably male. Further, conforming to the logic of the digital sexual supplement, it could be construed that any subject who discovered such was the victim of an accident—he (and the ideological fantasy at hand underscores that the subject is a he) can maintain the alibi of the accidental discovery of Chatroulette’s sexual content. In Shortbus’s representation of Rob’s consumption of Internet pornography, it remains unclear whether the Internet and digitalized texts, sounds, and images are a dystopian or utopian answer to the dissatisfaction the spouses both experience in the marriage; this uncertainty mirrors the larger discomfort about the immense bulk of pornographic materials that circulate electronically. A shorter video distributed by way of the Internet, “Immersion: Porn,” allows us to explore the ambiguous status of the digital erotic. In this 2009 video, artist Robbie Cooper videotapes six individuals—three women and three men—as they discuss their viewing practices of pornography. Cooper’s subjects talk about the occasions in which they first encountered pornographic materials—most of them electronic and online—and the kinds of pornography they consume. Worth noting is that the subjects are young: almost all of them are in their twenties and thus they assume access to and familiarity with Internet pornography. As they speak, Cooper’s subjects fix their gazes on the video’s viewer because Cooper employs an optical array of cameras and mirrors called the “Interrotron,” a technology innovated by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. The Interrotron positions the subject to be filmed or videotaped in such a manner as to have him or her view the interviewer’s face as it is projected in real-­time on a two-­way mirror that covers the camera’s lens; thus, the subject experiences virtual eye contact with her or his interlocu-

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tor, while the subject’s gaze is recorded as being fixed directly into the camera. The net effect is that the spectator is made to experience the video’s subjects—framed in close-­up—as engaged in direct address to the viewer. Morris has commented on the surprising effects that this technology has for his filmmaking; of interest here is the sense of intimacy made possible by the Interrotron (a neologism coined by Morris’s wife, Julia Sheehan, combining interview and terror): We often think of technology as working against the possibility of intimacy. But there are so many counter-­examples. The telephone is a good counter-­ example. There are things we can say to each other on the phone that we would never say if we were in the same room. You know, “Being there is the next best thing to using the phone.” . . . The Interrotron is like that. It creates greater distance and greater intimacy. And it also creates the true first person. Now, when people make eye contact with me, it can be preserved on film.6

Cooper takes advantage of the direct gaze of the Interrotron by intercutting shots of his subjects both as they discuss their consumption of pornography and as they view and masturbate to pornography projected onto the Interrotron’s two-­way mirror. Their faces contort into a variety of ecstatic expressions, but frequently Cooper cuts back to them speaking conversationally to the lens and to the viewer. The effect of this system of looking, recording, and editing is to narrate a different relation to sexuality that does not privilege orgasm as the culmination of genital sexuality—the centerpiece of conventional pornography—but rather reorders the events to understand that it is sexual discourse that is always what follows sexual climax. Further, as Morris suggests, the viewer experiences a paradoxical combination of distance and intimacy: a remoteness brought about by the fact that we probably do not know these men and women, and an intimacy that they seem to be looking into our eyes and discussing their electronically mediated pleasures in graphic and frank terms. The experience of viewing Cooper’s video can be uncomfortable; like the film that seems to function in its genealogy, Andy Warhol’s Blowjob, the pleasure generated by the moving image finds its genesis in viewer fantasy rather than in the recorded pro-­filmic event. Just as Warhol’s camera in Blowjob frames its subject in close-­up and only implies, by way of its title, that the subject is experiencing oral sex out of the frame—but registering its pleasures on the face—“Immersion: Porn” situates its viewer as a sexual subject who must speculate on the videographic images that are being imposed on the viewer’s face. Further, we might fantasize about how

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a given subject gains pleasure from looking into our eyes, but because of the mediation of our computer screens, we know that such is not the case. Cooper’s larger project, Immersion, investigates the relations between contemporary subjects and digital media in a variety of genres; the closest parallel to “Immersion: Porn” is another of Cooper’s videos that situates children within the Interrotron as they play on a videogame console. While the focus and intensity of their faces strikingly correspond to the adult faces, unlike their adult counterparts they disappointingly do not discuss gaming’s role in their lives. Cooper’s subjects in the “Porn” video consistently describe their relations to the pornography that they view as positive and reject the commonsense notion that its consumption must always be pathologized. One young woman, Lindsay, narrates her first encounter with pornography: “At six years old, I found a story by my brother on the family computer about a boy who watched porn and went to hell because it was satanic—which even then I thought was total bullshit.” While Cooper orients the collection of interviews toward a sense that porn is only ever a beneficial presence in his subjects’ sexual life stories, what is more remarkable about the video is that it provokes its viewers by situating the topic as one of matter-­of-­fact disclosure rather than the melodramatic alarm that Shortbus uses to sponsor marital discord. Ceth and the Smartphone In the film’s first sequence in the Shortbus club, Sofia encounters Ceth as he stares into the screen of his smartphone; he tells her, “It’s the Yenta650— it’s supposed to find me a husband.” No sooner has he entered a profile than the device chimes that it has a match for him. Following a comic exchange that reanimates a long-­standing and familiar joke about penis size—the device conveys this, among other information—Ceth prepares to leave for his meeting with the stranger by taking a picture of himself with his phone’s camera and asking Sofia how his hair looks. The centerpiece of this playful discussion is that Ceth suggests that Yenta650 will find him a husband—a rather substantial euphemism but one that embraces the past decade’s political emphasis on same-­sex marriage—but instead it immediately finds him a sexual partner. Mitchell’s comedy here turns on the fact that the sole marriage in the film produces the greatest misgivings about sex, while the Yenta650 seems to bring more pleasure than all the marriage counseling and sex therapy we see. This is

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not to discount the potential social and sexual contacts to be made through Yenta650, because it holds a world of possibility that queer men seek to take advantage of. Indeed, compared to the frustrated domesticity of James and Jamie, perhaps such technology holds a promise for new modes of interaction. It is not guaranteed that it will, but it is not entirely the case that it cannot, a premise that Shortbus takes seriously. In this regard, Mitchell’s depiction of the Yenta650 was prescient, given that it took a full two years for such a cellular application to come to market. Grindr was released for use by iPhones in March 2009 and, at date of publication, is reported to have 500,000 subscribers. This “geo-­social” device uses GPS to inform individual users of the profiles and proximity of other users; Ceth’s use of Yenta650 suggests some of the implications of this social networking technology for its users, not least that it reorganizes men in the cosmopolitan space as they seek sexual pleasure. There is, of course, an older name to this practice: cruising. And it is often lamented among urban queer men that the possibility of encountering other like-­minded men in the city—on the street, in bars, in commercial spaces—has been supplanted by the Internet, given that the Web, with its own social networking practices, has privatized sexual solicitation by situating users at home while they surfed. Grindr, it would seem, restores the body of the cruising man to the built space of the city, but in the current historical epoch he has a substantial database at his disposal. This would seem to have been the intent of Grindr’s inventor, Joel Simkhai. Describing Grindr as “the biggest change in gay hookups since the hanky code,” Simkhai narrates Grindr’s invention: Five years ago I started getting frustrated with all the other dating websites and with the idea of “Why is location not a higher priority?” You can search based on zip code, but what about the guy who’s in my building or across the street? Then Google maps came along and I thought I should put together a mashup of Google maps and dating. Then the iPhone came around, the first generation was two or three years ago, and that was fine, but the second generation was when they added applications you could download from the App Store. Three major things happened—one was GPS, another was the app store, the last one was iPhone SDK which was the software language to write these apps in an easy way. So these three events occurred and then it was obvious that we gotta do [Grindr]. And now we can do it.7

Simkhai then suggests, “I think as humans, especially as men, we respond to what we see. It’s one of the most important things, what does the other

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guy look like?” and, despite the fact the we might pause to consider whether it is indeed a global enterprise to ask oneself “what does the other guy look like?” more important for this account are several assumptions Simkhai makes about the nature of technological and digital information innovations as they relate to sexuality. First, it is rare that same-­sex desire is the occasion through which desire more generally is articulated and second, the “visibility” of the erotic becomes here, in quite explicit terms, the conditions under which sexual pleasure circulates. Conclusion In 1977, Thomas Waugh wrote about the then-­emerging cinematic productions that might offer new, pro-­gay narratives of sexual, personal, and political reinvention. In an essay on The Naked Civil Servant (dir. Jack Gold, 1975), Waugh argued, “We will only see it [nonpathologizing narratives of same-­sex sexuality] when we ourselves control our own distribution and exhibition systems.”8 I invoke Waugh’s insights here about new media— which queer cinema was at the time—because of the manner in which his account conjoins sexual, aesthetic, and economic concerns through technology. Waugh’s emphasis on distribution and exhibition—two of the central economic and technological dimensions of cultural economies coming after that of “production”—prompts my own thoughts about the digital technologies of sexuality and sexual representation that emerge currently because, unlike the moment in which queer cinema was emerging, sexual self-­representation in the digital epoch seems less a concern with control of the movement and display of erotic content (its distribution and exhibition) and more about the avoidance of such. In this regard, the malleability of the digital and the sense that much of the content that travels through its associated networks is occluded from view because all of its content— including sexual representations—moves over the same technologies that facilitate the “business” of everyday life. This essay has interpreted Shortbus as a generically conventional film in the uses to which it puts its depictions of sexuality; that is, its emphasis on the visuality of the female orgasm as a necessity for women locates the body of the woman—as site of pleasure, regulation, and self-­regulation— as the place where the larger social order stands or falls. However, it is worth recognizing the moment at the film’s closure when, having joined the musical ensemble at the Shortbus club, Sofia meets a couple—a man and a woman—whose sexual play at the club has fascinated her. In this last

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moment, Sofia is embraced and caressed by this unnamed pair, and the film ends without telling us where or how this erotic scene ultimately resolves itself. Removed from the constraints of the household and the domestic economy in which her husband was expected to “give” her an orgasm, her desire moves into the social space of the club. Here, it seems that Sofia’s erotic life and the film’s understanding of women’s sexuality become a part of what Justin earlier described as the “circuit”—unnarrated, exploratory, and tentative—in short, the sexual possibilities of the digital epoch. Notes

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8

Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 288. Ibid. Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age (London: Wallflower Press, 2009), 133. Ibid., 134. James Moran, There’s No Place like Home Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 165. “Eye Contact,” Errol Morris, www.errolmorris.com/content/eyecontact/interrotron .html (accessed May 3, 2010). Zack Rosen, “Interviews: The Fathr of Grindr, Joel Simkhai,” The New Gay, February 18, 2010, http://thenewgay.net/2010/02/the-­fathr-­of-­grindr-­joel-­simkhai.html. Thomas Waugh, The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 32.

Kevin Ohi ​“ The

consummation of the swallow’s wings”: A Zoo Story

         an illusion so desired That the green leaves came and covered the high rock, That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned, Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied, In a birth of sight. —Wallace Stevens, “The Rock”

​It “

is particularly interesting,” wrote Alfred Kinsey, “to note the degree of the abhorrence with which intercourse between the human and animals of other species is viewed by most persons who have not had such an experience.”1 As many critics of Robinson Devor’s 2007 film Zoo did not hesitate to point out, that abhorrence has been official policy at least since Leviticus. Based on interviews with zoophiles (or “zoos”) in Enumclaw, Washington, after one of their friends (Mr. Hands) died from internal bleeding caused by sex with a horse, the film is remarkably unsensational, which, in light of the scandal caused by that death, is not the least of its accomplishments. In the minor scandal occasioned, in turn, by Devor’s film, many condemned Zoo for evading moral issues. “When one zoophile equates his love for horses to other men’s love for their The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:3, Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-1275860 © 2011 Duke University Press

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wives and children,” Richard Brody wrote in the New Yorker, “questions of morality and perspective arise which Devor scrupulously avoids.”2 Others were more specific about what those questions might be. For some on the (more or less Christian) right, the film’s tolerance confirmed that Western civilization was sliding down a slope of increasing slipperiness—from homosexual marriage to bestiality and pedophilia.3 “Same-­sex marriage is now an established fact in advanced societies,” wrote Ralph McInerny: “And it is this that heartens those who want to push on to overcoming superstitions about bestiality. Their case is crystal clear. Marriage is the provision of mutual venereal pleasure. Both animals and humans are capable of venereal pleasure and capable of providing it to one another. For them to do so constitutes marriage in any defensible sense of the term. There is, then, no intellectual obstacle to the union of man and beast.”4 For William Jasper, likewise, toleration of “the sodomite ‘lifestyle’” has led “to demands for same-­sex marriage and the right for GLBT adoption of children” and will lead to “the breaking of taboos against inter-­species venereal relations.”5 I confess that I do not share their concerns, although I have had more than one occasion to wish that someone would put a stop to “GLBT adoption of children.” (I also agree that marriage and “mutual venereal pleasure” should be kept distinct as concepts—but that boundary is probably safe, even without my intervention.) My interest in bestiality, I further confess, is neither in asserting that, after all, homosexuality is no closer to bestiality than heterosexuality is (or, for that matter, that gay relationships, with or without the imprimatur of marriage, might often extend beyond “venereal pleasure,” mutual or not), nor simply in suggesting that I (and my “sodomite lifestyle”) might nevertheless have good reasons to defend zoos against those who would persecute them (and reduce their desires to the punch line of a homophobic joke) purely on the grounds of a contempt for human sexual variation. Frankly, I am not sure I do see any reason people should not marry their horses. Even from the (more compelling) perspective of potential harm to its objects of desire, surely bestiality is no more right or wrong than is pedophilia or heterosexuality, however worthy of censure or praise might be individual actions taken by those who experience such desires. For many who find sex with animals objectionable on grounds other than that it reminds them of gay marriage, pedophilia also offers the decisive analogy: animals, like children (as they assert), cannot consent.6 That argument seems farcical to me, and not just because to refuse any possibility of consent also erases any meaningful distinction among degrees of coercion and thus makes sexual violation all but meaningless,

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and not just because I am not sure that consent is a very useful concept for the middle range of human sexuality—to say nothing of whether “consent” makes sense in discussions of animal “sexuality.” In Zoo, it is left to Rush Limbaugh to point out that, if you are to be anally penetrated by a horse, the horse needs on some level to be willing. On the one hand, arguments based on an analogy to pedophilia are not terribly compelling. Short of physical harm to the animal or abusive forms of restraint or coercion, one is left with a tendentious analogy to psychological trauma (dramatized in one of the more hallucinatory moments in Zoo, when a miniature horse displays signs [by giving a stallion a blow job] of the sexual precocity and hypersexualization that are widely disseminated commonplaces of psychological accounts of child abuse). Such analogies are left for the most part implicit. (Jenny Edwards, the animal rescuer who witnesses the equine fellatio, calls the zoo who condones that sex act a “child molester type.”) On the other hand, the conflation of children and animals illuminates (if only symptomatically) our understanding of sexuality. Its typical invocation may simplify the question of consent; when it comes to children and animals, one is forbidden to ask whether they can ever consent to sex. But consent itself poses questions about the boundaries of human subjectivity; to assert that children (and animals) cannot consent is another way to assert that adults (humans) can—and that a subjectivity present to itself experiences sexuality as governed by intention. (That image of human desire, more than any vulnerable creature, is what is protected by rhetorics of consent.) But because subjects cannot originate themselves, that governing intention is ruptured from the start—which might be one reason for our fascination with the sex lives of animals and children. From horny male fruit flies to “gay” sheep, albatross, and bonobos, ostensibly gay animals pose the question of the origins (and manipulability) of sexuality— questions posed, too, by the sexualization (by themselves or by others) of children.7 And, as in reactions to childhood sexuality, discussions of animal sex typically evade the confrontation with such quandaries of origination. In popular accounts, a drastically simplified version of evolution authorizes a whole series of simplifications: of the relation between human desire and gendered sex acts (so that male animals taking “female” positions in sex are labeled “gay,” for instance), of the purposes of such behavior for animals themselves (so that typically all sexual behavior is understood to be governed by exigencies of reproduction—explaining same-­sex behavior as practice, or mishap, or making do when pickings are slim), of, not least, the crossings of biology and systems of meaning that form human sexuality.8

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A subject riven against itself by desire and by the origins it cannot claim as its own is also made manifest by various forms of communication technology, which have never been content to be mere prostheses or instruments but have come to invade human subjectivity from within. “Digital desire” might simply mean that such technologies exacerbate or make explicit a fundamental experience of desire: a confrontation with origins that exceed the self, an experience of subjectivity radically open to other worlds, other minds, other forms of being. To this extent, such technologies are not simply opposed to animal life: as the human body melds with the machine, it paradoxically rediscovers its animality. Thus it is that Donna Haraway could move directly from cyborgs to animals, with only a brief hiatus for agility training.9 Zoo opens with the sound (just audible underneath the music) of a modem making a connection on a phone line— a sound that viewers in an age of DSL might not universally have forgotten. That stuttering beep is accompanied by a flickering light in the distance that turns out to be the opening of a coal mine that the camera eventually exits. I will return to that shot—and to many others like it—but, for the moment, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the camera is traveling along a phone line, that we are seeing the view of “bytes” traveling on the Internet. The miner’s escape from the mine—into fresh air and implicitly into sexual liberation—is rendered as a cybernetic voyage. It is easy enough to trace the thematic importance of the Internet in Zoo. The characters take their names from their “handles” in Internet chat rooms, and the first thing we see is Coyote surfing the Web. The zoos find out about each other and about themselves online, and others, too, read up on zoophilia there. Whatever one’s perspective on the morality of fostering nonnormative desires, it is clear that the Internet, by allowing virtual forms of community, by disseminating information and images, and by allowing personal connections to form in spite of geographical separation, does foster such desires.10 Moreover, as more than one social scientist has suggested, the Internet not only helped many people attracted to animals gain access to information (about sex with animals and, even more important, about others who share their desires), it also led many to begin thinking of their desire as constituting a minority sexual identity.11 The Internet, in other words, turned people who practiced (or fantasized about practicing) bestiality into zoos. The Internet is thus internal to the sexual identity in zoophiles in a way that distinguishes it, historically, from older sexual identities whose dissemination of necessity took other forms (though even now, knowledge of these identities must, for younger people, be disseminated in

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A Zoo Story 719

ways not entirely dissimilar to that of zoophilia, and it must still be the case that homosexuality is, for at least some individuals in some circumstances, as unknown and unthinkable a possibility as zoophilia). Zoophilia is, in this sense, quintessentially “digital desire.” Arguably, that historical difference makes manifest aspects of any form of desire or identification potentially masked by the immediacy or ostensible tangibility of other forms of dissemination. The sociological fact of the structuring of zoophilia as a sexual identity by Internet technology becomes in Zoo the opportunity for a meditation on what one might call “virtual desire.” The understanding (popularized by Kinsey but no doubt prevalent before him) of zoophilia and bestiality (like other “deviant” sexualities) as a substitution for “real” (e.g., heterosexual) sexual contact finds an echo in an idea that might initially occur to one watching Zoo—that the mediation of technology alienates these men from genuine human contact, so that sex with animals can be said to be “like” a world of presence that has retreated into simulation (“If you can’t be there, you can at least see or read about it,” says Coyote, explaining the allure of the then-­new technology of the Internet). The crossing of animals and technology in the realm of sex makes manifest a paradox: sex with animals (in the popular imagination) is both more and less than sex, and animals are both more and less “embodied.” The beautiful cinematography of the film argues against an opposition between mediation and embodiment: to view the mediated images of this film is to undergo an immediate sensual experience, and one connected—as I hope to specify—to the desire it depicts. The film is fascinated by the virtual: we are subjected to talk radio throughout, and when a news helicopter overhead wreaks havoc in their house, the zoos who find themselves the object of unwelcome scrutiny watch the event on television, pivoting from screen to window, as if verifying that the scenes match. Arriving to pick up horses from a disgraced zoo, Jenny Edwards says she could not process what she was seeing; therefore, she explains, she turned on her “internal camera,” her “head cam,” and “recorded” the visit (we therefore see what is ostensibly head-­cam footage). As this last instance suggests, whether the film views such understandings of virtuality (Jenny’s, for instance, or Coyote’s) as pathological symptoms of modern alienation, the virtual is central to the way the film is shot. One of the more astonishing sequences shows several zoos watching a video of the 1969 moon landing while a moon illumines the landscape outside a large window in the darkened room. Thematically motivated, perhaps, by Mr. Hands’s job as an aerospace engineer at Boeing, the sequence

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also brings to the fore this pairing of “virtual” and “direct” viewing. The same view out the window, in daylight and unanchored by any subjective orientation (and without the framing of the window to indicate its relation to the house), appears at several earlier moments. The later shot therefore both orients us and comments on the earlier ones—reminding us that our view of mountain and moon is as “virtual” as the zoos’ of the moon landing. That the story of Mr. Hands was disseminated by the Internet—the story itself, and numerous parodies and “reaction” videos to the footage of his sex with a stallion went “viral,” reaching an audience far beyond local Washington or interested zoophiles, a broader audience that included, one cannot but imagine, the filmmakers—also points to the ways our gaze at the story is mediated by communication technologies and is therefore in a sense “virtual.” To come to grips with the film’s understanding of virtual desire—its understanding of zoophilia as “virtual,” which is to say crossed with Internet technology in a way that goes far beyond pragmatic questions—is to see how that virtuality is not unrelated to what gets people so exercised about bestiality. It is perhaps startling to discover Peter Singer in agreement with the Ralph McInerny who saw in the wedding of Ellen DeGeneres the portents of a civilization’s demise; the animal rights philosopher and the deranged Catholic bigot do, however, agree on one thing: bestiality threatens the boundary between human and animal. Thus it is perhaps less surprising than it might seem to find McInerny targeting vegetarians in his animadversions on sexual permissiveness (“What else is evolution but the recognition of the essential sameness of life in all its forms?”).12 In contrast to the many critics of the film who note the strangeness of a society that finds bestiality beyond the pale and factory-­farmed meat business as usual, McInerny presents a bracing moral perspective from which not torturing and killing animals is a moral infraction akin to (gay and intergenerational) lechery. For Singer, the taboo on bestiality, which serves to maintain human superiority over animals, is fueled by “our desire to differentiate ourselves, erotically and in every other way, from animals.”13 While many accused Singer of sidestepping consent (a criticism likewise leveled at Zoo),14 it seems arguable that invocations of consent serve to sustain structures of inequality: adults over children, humans over animals.15 More radically than that, if what is at stake in bestiality is the boundary between human and animal, the taboo on bestiality is perhaps one mechanism in what Giorgio Agamben calls “the anthropological machine.”16 The confused invocation of consent bears witness to that mechanism: children,

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A Zoo Story 721

mute and definitionally unable to consent, become the animal that, internal to the human, must be bracketed to constitute the human as such. To explore the relation of such questions to virtuality in Zoo, we might begin by asking what its visual beauty has to do with its ostensible subject. In this visually lavish film, which so often evokes the pleasures of sight, it is conspicuous that one thing cannot be seen: sex with horses. To the extent that such sex is shown, it is shown to be unwatchable: in an unintentionally comic scene, police detectives animated by obscure motives force elderly horse-­owners to watch their stallion have sex with the man they had hired to care for him.17 We hear the soundtrack and see ambiguous flashes of video; what the almost hysterically mobile camera shows us is the couple’s horrified effort not to watch. If it is unclear why they’re horrified—it could be indignation at the treatment of the horse, or it could be a more strictly aesthetic revulsion—the moment makes explicit that sex with horses (after all, the central event of the film) cannot be shown. One way to pose the question I hope to address is this: what is the relation between that unwatchable sex act and the formal or visual excess that appears in the film’s thematically undermotivated sequences of extraordinary beauty? If watching the film Zoo is made—in lieu of any representation of horse sex— to stand in for the experience of zoophilia, what does the film suggest about zoophilia as a form of “digital desire”? To come to grips with the crossing of desire with the Internet, it seems to me that one needs to turn to what is ostensibly the “opposite” of the forms of attention spawned by Internet technology: literary pleasure. Unexpectedly, the exploration of zoophilia in Zoo illuminates an embodied experience of reading that poets and novelists likewise figure in relation to animals; various displacements of perspective and voice that literary texts explore in terms of literary meaning as it shades into animal movement in turn help clarify Zoo’s understanding of zoophilia as virtual desire. Striking in this regard is what Zoo does not give us: it does not offer any sustained account of the psychology of zoophilia. It is not interested in the etiology of the desire, and it is reticent not only about depicting horse sex but about describing the psychology of the desire that would lead one to practice it.18 Zoophilia is “digital desire” for Zoo because it is a matter of surface— bodies moving from place to place and experiencing sensations as they encounter other persons and animals—rather than depth. To read certain literary texts about animals in this context is to perceive their exploration of a form of absorption not correlated to experience of psychological depth. For that reason—because one perhaps inevitably experiences oneself as a

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psychology and as a “depth”—such texts make an experience of embodied reading “feel” curiously like a transcending of the body. To experience a text as an embodied reader is to experience a subjective destitution that is difficult to distinguish from the body’s vanishing. In what follows, the context of Zoo will help specify what is at stake in the appearance of animals in texts by J. M. Coetzee, William Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop; these texts, in turn, will help to spell out more specifically how Zoo understands zoophilia as a form of virtual—or “digital”—desire and to explain the relation between its visual beauty and its depiction of bestiality as unwatchable. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace offers one way to frame the moral or ethical questions of sex with animals, and it might initially appear to endorse an analogy between the abuse of the young and the abuse of animals. Yet that seems far too simple a way to understand the relation between what occasions David Lurie’s professional “disgrace”—an affair with an undergraduate—and an increasingly unbearable intuition of animal suffering that leads to an intransigent refusal to allow the desecration of the bodies of euthanized dogs. In his seduction of the girl, we read, “She does not own herself. Beauty does not own itself.”19 These terms return later in a description of sheep his daughter’s neighbors have bought to slaughter for a feast: “When did a sheep last die of old age? Sheep do not own themselves, do not own their lives. They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry. Nothing escapes, except perhaps the gall bladder, which no one will eat” (123–24). Before seeing an intimation that Lurie’s words to the girl are self-­deluding or self-­ justifying, one might attend to the question of how beauty’s not owning itself is like a sheep’s not owning itself. The sex in Disgrace is remarkably unpleasant: “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. As though she decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck” (25). (Later, he remembers her arms flopping “like the arms of a dead person” [89].) If, however, the novel identifies the girl with mistreated and maimed animals, it does not do so by analogy to any abuse of professorial power. The parallel is instead based on embodiment: beauty does not own itself as a sheep does not own itself because beauty, too, is embodied, and therefore subject to the depredations of time. “He has a shrewd idea of how prostitutes speak among themselves about the men who frequent them, the older men in particular. They tell stories, they laugh, but they shudder, too, as one shudders at a cockroach

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A Zoo Story 723

in the washbasin in the middle of the night. Soon, daintily, maliciously, he will be shuddered over. It is a fate he cannot escape” (8). To become a cockroach: David’s empathy for animals seems to derive from what often makes sex repellent in the novel’s rendering of it: his aging body. “Perhaps it is the right of the young to be protected from the sight of their elders in the throes of passion. That is what whores are for, after all: to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely” (44). David begins to feel empathy for animals when aging—and the brutal attack at the center of the novel—makes him aware of his body as wounded, and as mortal: “he has a vision of himself stretched out on an operating table. A scalpel flashes; from throat to groin he is laid open; he sees it all yet feels no pain. A surgeon, bearded, bends over him, frowning. What is all this stuff ? growls the surgeon. He pokes at the gall bladder. What is this? He cuts it out, tosses it aside. He pokes at the heart. What is this?” (171). Another way to phrase these questions would be to ask in what register we should understand the “disgrace” of the novel’s title. We might hear shame or an intimation of a fall (through the negation of grace—“graceless Seraphim” is Faulkner’s phrase for the fallen angels),20 but we might also hear, more literally, a purely physical disfigurement or deformity: disgrace as a negation of the graceful—grace as Walter Pater, for instance, often uses it, as a synonym for “comely.” That’s also the question of Lurie’s reading of Wordsworth and Byron, and of his opera about Byron’s mistress, “plain, ordinary” Teresa (182): disgrace is a question of poetry’s relation to embodiment. His recurrent invocations of the grammatical category of the “perfective”—“signifying action carried through to its conclusion . . . I live, I have lived, I lived” (71)—raises, among other questions, that of the possibility of assimilating linguistic forms and biological life. For Disgrace, these categories confront each other in an experience of radical destitution linked to animal life. “Yes, I agree, it is humiliating,” Lurie’s daughter says of being forced (by the threat of rape) to marry her neighbor and sign over her farm to him. “But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.” “Like a dog.” “Yes, like a dog.” (205) 21

That destitution seems in many respects opposed to the term used earlier to describe the killing of dogs: die Lösung. “When people bring a dog in they

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do not say straight out, ‘I have brought you this dog to kill,’ but that is what is expected: that they will dispose of it, make it disappear, dispatch it to oblivion. What is being asked for is, in fact, Lösung (German always to hand with an appropriately blank abstraction): sublimation, as alcohol is sublimed from water, leaving no residue, no aftertaste” (142).22 To be left with nothing is opposed to this purification; such destitution is a kind of remainder, residue, or aftertaste—the dog, and not the purification of the dog. The question that Lurie seems to pose in his opera is whether that destitution can be the ground of art—whether unlovely women and dogs can sing: That is why he must listen to Teresa. Teresa may be the last one left who can save him. Teresa is past honour. She pushes out her breasts to the sun; she plays the banjo in front of the servants and does not care if they smirk. She has immortal longings, and sings her longings. She will not be dead. . . . (209) Arbitrarily, unconditionally, he has been adopted; the dog would die for him, he knows. The dog is fascinated by the sound of the banjo. When he strums the strings, the dog sits up, cocks its head, listens. When he hums Teresa’s line, and the humming begins to swell with feeling (it is as though his larynx thickens: he can feel the hammer of blood in his throat), the dog smacks its lips and seems on the point of singing too, or howling. Would he dare to do that: bring a dog into the piece, allow it to loose its own lament to the heavens between the strophes of lovelorn Teresa’s? Why not? Surely, in a work that will never be performed, all things are permitted? (215)

“Beauty is momentary in the mind,” writes Wallace Stevens. “The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal. / The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.”23 The intransigence of Teresa’s desire—unlovely, “past honour,” with her “immortal longings”—points to a not entirely dissimilar logic. Disgrace leads not to purification without residue but to a residue or remnant, immortal longing, a music-­loving dog on the verge of song. The destitution that the discussion of Lurie’s opera suggests can be made a foundation, for art is linked to a body but not to a self, which—more than any discussion of consent—is what links the ethics of animal life in Coetzee and the depiction of zoophilia in Zoo. Lurie is a remarkably uncongenial character, thwarting sympathy and identification alike. His ethical failing, though, is his recuperation of intimations of bodily destitution as

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the experience of a self, a recuperation that, by sidestepping psychology, Zoo resists. In his decision to kill the dog at the end of the text, Lurie mistakenly thinks that that destitution can be owned, that it is the property of a person: “I am giving him up” (220). While on the one hand this moment marks a final destitution—disgrace, ultimately, is “the disgrace of dying” (143)—on the other, the transition from impersonal pronouns (“what the dog will not be able to work out . . . is how one can enter what seems to be an ordinary room and never come out again. . . . It will be beyond him, this room that is not a room but a hole where one leaks out of existence” [219]) to “I am giving him up” suggests that Lurie, to the extent that he views the relinquishment as his own, evades that death and returns to a logic of Lösung. If beauty does not own itself, if sheep do not own themselves, that fact of mortality means that no one does. Against his understanding of the destitution of being “like a dog” as a one-­way traversal of the perfective (“I live, I have lived, I lived”)—where, even here, the assimilation of linguistic forms and biological life seems also to stress an I that survives, if only to utter an impossible utterance24—the renunciation that closes the novel is in the progressive, as if his relinquishment could exempt the I who speaks from the perfective’s implacable trajectory. The importance of Zoo’s indifference to psychology—and, ultimately, its rendering of bestiality as a mode of filming—should be read in this context. A striking aspect of popular discussions of the effects on human consciousness of the Internet and the proliferation of electronic communication devices—“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said “leading brain scientist” Nora Volkow in the New York Times25—is their understanding of absorption, which one can only call machinic. Repeatedly emphasized as the distraction of “multitasking,” which vacillates between an inability to focus and a pathologically (because productivity-­sapping) compulsive form of attention—where distraction looks curiously like absorption directed at improper objects. (The cyber-­queer might recall that one meaning of queer is “absorbed or interested to an extreme or unreasonable degree.”26) Such accounts also emphasize the (“primitive”) bodily pleasure of such distraction—in ways that make absorption and communication technologies sound like an experience of a body escaping the executive control of a brain. The Internet—it is therefore not surprising to discover—is often understood to be a threat to children, to their capacity for cognition and attention, their impulse control (and hence moral agency), and to their very safety—threats that are often cast in sexual terms. Hence, perhaps, the recurrent warnings about the dangers of the Internet—in the absence of

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empirical evidence that posting personal information is actually risky for kids, that they could really “accidentally” view pornography, that such accidental viewing would scar them, or that there is any significant risk posed by strangers seeking to proposition them sexually. The technology itself is sexual—and suspiciously bodily. In one illuminating account, then, the sexual danger of the Internet is put in terms of a disruption of distance: Not all parents can live in safe and decent neighborhoods, but all good parents would if they could. None like the idea of their children turning a corner into a bad or dangerous situation in which they could be abused, exploited, or exposed to malignant influences. Now consider the Internet. On the Internet there are no good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. The Web is like one vast expanse with no zoning of any kind. Nice homes sit next to crack houses and porn theaters operate adjacent to playgrounds. The “distance” between websites is somewhere between nonexistent and trivial; indeed, the very concept of distance is inapplicable.27

Formulating an image of the Internet that sounds curiously like a classless society—where there would be no good or bad neighborhoods, and suburbs would merge with the “inner city”—this discussion of porn on the Internet (and the need to protect children from it) is energized not only by linking a fear of sex to fears about declining property values (which all good parents cherish) but also by an implicitly sexualized erosion of distance. On the Web, as in the perspectiveless view of a map, “North’s as near as West.”28 As in Disgrace, the possibility of assimilating biological life and linguistic forms is a central question of Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” where sensation—as in paranoid accounts of the Internet—seems unmoored from any governing self and where the destitution of Disgrace seems indistinguishable from something like joy. The poem, famously, contraposes two forms of transcendence—an immortality associated with religious observance and an ephemeral sensual beauty it comes to associate with poetry: Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering

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The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.29

Against “I am giving him up,” here the locus of sensation disappears into a sensed world: even as it is asserted that “Divinity must live within herself,” the formulations leave in question the location of the affects described, leave in question whether the moods are in her, or in falling snow, and thus, by embodying divinity and rendering embodiment as a permeability to the world, constitute a “within” by dispersing it across a landscape. In Stevens’s evocation of embodiment as an embeddedness in a world of sense perception, perhaps most striking is both the heterogeneity of the relations invoked and the fact that the seductions of the language work to obscure that heterogeneity. “Moods in falling snow” is made parallel to “grievings in loneliness”; there is an analogous, but again not quite parallel, effect in “gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights.” The uses of “in” and “on,” respectively, appear to indicate parallel relations, in other words, but are used in ways that suggest heterogeneous ones. (That parallelism is of course the point: to sense is to be “in loneliness” as one is “in falling snow.”) These two terms, moreover, are made to sound parallel to each other—and the heterogeneous uses of both terms, coupled, is likewise made into a kind of parallel. All these, in turn, are made part of a series that ends in a temporal relation, in “unsubdued elations when the forest blooms.” An embeddedness in the world—a confusion not unlike that found in the disorientations of digital technology: is perception in her or in the rain and snow?—is condensed in the ambiguity of the genitive, “passions of rain,” which, moreover, is made parallel to the elements in the nonparallel series that follows. The seductive power of sound—which obscures the heterogeneity of these elements or, perhaps better, foregrounds both the heterogeneity and the poem’s power to unify disparate elements—makes of the dispersal of sensation across a landscape a drama of internalization. This occurs as the assimilation of spatial and temporal relations—“moods in falling snow” and “unsubdued elations when the forest blooms”—transforms metonymy into metaphor. The “Divinity” that “must live within herself ” can become a metaphor if the metonymic relations can be internalized, a process that occurs in time: “these are the measures destined for her soul.” (It isn’t just that they are “destined for her soul,” and not (yet) her soul itself; it is also that they are measures—a temporal marker that makes the term also a synonym for poetic meter and, by synecdoche, for poetry.) Poetry’s

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meter, and poetry tout court, thus comes to be nothing short of the tattoo of temporality: “divinity,” as the internalization of rapture and of, paradoxically, an ecstatic dispersal of the self, therefore comes to be synonymous with mortality and with an experience of a mortal body. To move from a body’s embeddedness in a world to measures is thus to see why “Death is the mother of beauty” is the poem’s Paterian refrain. For the poem, the embodied pleasure of poetry is also the realm of animal life: “I am content when wakened birds, / Before they fly, test the reality / Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings.” What’s beautiful, I think, is the image of sound fleshing out a visible world: the misty fields figure a dawning of sense perception for which emerges, tentatively, the contours of a world, and the sweet questionings, as sound resonating in that space, are both perceptible and make perception itself tangible. The questionings of the birds thus also seem to figure the sonic element of poetry: poetry as animal call as against the religion of what earlier is called “silent Palestine,” across the wide water “without sound.” Whether sense perception and poetry as sound can be said to produce a form of transcendence in the absence of any afterlife—if, as “she hears a voice” telling her, the tomb of Jesus “is not the porch of spirits lingering” but only a grave—is the question of the poem’s ending, where the animals again return: Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

The animals pose the question of whether poetic sound is meaningful, and the stanza’s paradoxical answer is that it becomes meaningful insofar as its allegorical dimensions are negated, insofar as the darkness is just darkness, the pigeons’ undulations merely that—“ambiguous,” not as doubtful or uncertain but, literally, “driving hither and thither,” driving both ways—and insofar as “extended wings” figures a bodily extension into the world and is not, for example, a reference to the opening of the gates of hell in book 2 of Paradise Lost: “The Gates wide open stood, / That with extended wings a battered host . . . might pass through / With horse and chariots ranked in loose array.”30 The secularization of Milton’s image and

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the denial of human meaning to animal life become the ground of a poetic transcendence put on the side, not of meaning, but of animal movement. The claim staked for poetry occurs on the ground not of meaning or cognition but on the level of sense perception and its joy, which we share with animals. Read in these terms, Stevens’s poem unexpectedly links poetic language to what might be called the ethical argument Zoo makes through its mode of filming. Coetzee’s Disgrace poses the question of how beauty’s not owning itself is like a sheep’s not owning itself. Stevens’s poem seems to me to accomplish what Lurie imagines when he considers including the dog in his opera, and that novel’s radical destitution takes the form here of a transcendence indistinguishable from the reduction of poetic meaning to sound and to mere animal movement. Poetry’s music evokes that remnant marking an unremitting destitution. I would link it, therefore, to Cora Diamond’s arguments for vegetarianism: against arguments (by Peter Singer and others) based on animal rights, she sees in Coetzee (particularly in The Lives of the Animals and Elizabeth Costello) instead an intimation of what it is to be a fellow creature—embodied, wounded, vulnerable, and mortal. “The awareness we each have of a living body, being ‘alive to the world,’” she writes, “carries with it exposure to the bodily sense of vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with them.”31 The “coming apart of thought and reality belongs to flesh and blood.”32 This is what we see in Zoo. The literary examples so far have, however, involved animals but not sex with them. Closer as an explicit parallel to Zoo is the curious episode in Faulkner’s The Hamlet in which a mentally disabled man, Ike Snopes, elopes with a cow. As in Zoo, we are not shown the sex but we are shown others watching it. Unlike the horse owners in Zoo, Faulkner’s characters are eager to look; V. K. Ratliff feels compelled to intervene when he discovers a Snopes cousin is selling tickets. Before it becomes a spectacle for curious townsfolk, the interspecies couple elopes, and in the novel’s rendering of Ike’s desire, as in Zoo, what takes the place of explicit sex are evocations of sense perception. Among the most beautiful moments of Ike’s bovine idyll are the descriptions of the dawn, which—like “Sunday Morning”—constitute an aubade: now he watches the recurrence of that which he discovered for the first time three days ago: that dawn, light, is not decanted onto Earth from the sky, but instead is from the earth itself suspired. Roofed by the woven canopy of blind annealing grass-­roots and the roots of the trees, dark in the blind dark

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of time’s silt and rich refuse—the constant and unslumbering anonymous worm-­glut and the inextricable known bones—Troy’s Helen and the nymphs and the snoring mitered bishops, the saviors and the victims and the Kings— it wakes, up-­seeping, attritive in uncountable creeping channels: first, root; then frond by frond, from whose escaping tips like gas arises and disseminates and stains the sleep-­fast earth with drowsy insect-­murmur; then, still upward-­seeking, creeps the knitted bark of trunk and limb where, suddenly louder leaf by leaf and dispersive in diffusive sudden speed, melodious with winged and jeweled throats, it upward bursts and fills night’s globed negation with jonquil thunder. (200–201)

Transcendence comes from below, not from above—from the earth and the body, not from the sky or the soul. If nature becomes a cathedral, it is because the earth enfolds all these registers—myth, history, faith—and the “snoring mitered bishops” remain, even in effigy, embodied. The passage continues its ecstatic description of dawn until Ike’s movement and the sun’s converge to reveal the cow: “she stands as he left her, tethered, chewing.” The passage’s rhythm of alternation between transcendence and unadorned (if metrically beautiful—as the resolution here, for instance, of an uncertain meter into trochaic pentameter) physical description ceases to seem merely deflating when one considers that the aubade also renders the emergence of sensation—Ike’s consciousness of it or, simply, sensation itself. The alternating moments cease to seem opposed insofar as the most beautiful moments evoke a feeling of sensing for the first time. Throughout Ike’s honeymoon we find the emergence of sensation, of the senses, one by one—from “the uncohered all-­sentience of fluid and nerve-­springing terror alone and terribly free in the primal sightless inimicality” (182) to “then he would hear her and would lie drenched in the wet grass, serene and one and indivisible in joy, listening to her approach” to “He would smell her” to “then he would see her” (183). The alternation of elevated language and mere physical description thus seems a part of this becoming-­articulate of sensation: “he sets the basket before her. She begins to eat. The shifting shimmer of incessant leaves gives to her a quality of illusion as insubstantial as the prone negative of his late hurrying, but this too is not so: one blonde touch stipulates and affirms both weight and mass out of the flowing shadow-­maze; a hand’s breadth of contact shapes her solid and whole out of the infinity of hope. He squats beside her and begins to draw the teats” (201). The “hand’s breadth of contact” links these registers of language—links “the infinity of hope” to “he squats beside her and

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begins to draw the teats.” And that “hand’s breadth of contact” also seems to be the language describing the coming-­into-­being of sensation—language, therefore, not unlike a dog’s tongue: “So now it comes up to him, already fawning, invisible and fluid about his walking legs, its warm wet limber tongue shaping for him out of invisibility his own swinging hand” (199). In the context of The Hamlet the episode with Ike and the cow is tonally baffling—for any number of reasons—and it poses large questions about the novel’s understanding of desire, community, and ethics. But for my purposes, I would focus on questions of voice. The episode is tonally baffling in part because of the way its equivocal voicing is bound up with the desire it portrays. To begin with one tonally ambiguous moment, as Ike tries to save her from a fire, the cow unceremoniously craps on him. Then: when he moved toward her, she whirled and ran at the crumbling sheer of the slope, scrambling furiously at the vain and shifting sand as though in a blind paroxysm of shame, to escape not him alone but the very scene of the outragement of privacy where she had been sprung suddenly upon without warning from the dark and betrayed and outraged by her own treacherous biological inheritance, he following again, speaking to her, trying to tell her how this violent violation of her maiden’s delicacy is no shame, since such is the very iron imperishable warp of the fabric of love. But she would not hear. (192)

The mismatch of tone and context makes the moment potentially ba­thetic but also brings to the fore a redoubled ventriloquism. That mismatched language gives voice to the cow, of course, but also gives voice to Ike and to Ike’s ventriloquizing of the cow—he never says anything in the novel except his own name, which he cannot even pronounce. His “speaking to her” or “trying to tell her,” like her protest at the “outragement of her privacy,” is, ostentatiously, the narrator’s lending a voice to the mute. This layering of voice is not simply ironic insofar as it renders a central movement of this story: Ike’s love is a becoming-­articulate of sense. Ike’s thwarted development—cognition, memory, coordination, all seem to emerge in what is semi-­ironically called a form of childbirth—is apparent in the novel’s final glimpse of him after the cow’s death, where we see through Ratliff ’s eyes the fading of that potential: “[he] saw the thick, female, sitting buttocks, the shapeless figure quiet in the gloom, the blasted face turning and looking up at him, and for a fading instant there was something almost like recognition even if there could have been no remembering, in the devastated eyes, and the drooling mouth slacking and emitting

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a sound, hoarse, abject, not loud. Upon the overalled knees Ratliff saw the battered wooden effigy of a cow such as children receive on Christmas” (294–95). The moment is devastating because in this exchanging of live cow for wooden effigy, we see articulate speech, consciousness, cognition, and memory fail to emerge—a fading instant in which the poetic language of the earlier section gives way to a “hoarse, abject” sound. The disintegration of Ike’s body—the “shapeless figure” becomes a collection of parts (buttocks, face, eyes, mouth, knees) that accrue human motivation and attributes in Ike’s stead—presents a destitution that fails to speak. Yet in another sense it has already spoken, and the devastation seems to emphasize the language it negates but does not erase. It is arguable, therefore, that that tonal deflation—as a function of layered voice—constitutes something like the destitution I saw in Stevens and Coetzee. Another Miltonic allusion comes to mind—Ike tries to place a garland on the cow’s head: “out of the clumsy fumbling of the hands there emerges, already in dissolution, the abortive diadem. In the act of garlanding, it disintegrates, rains down the slant of brow and chewing head; fodder and flowers become one inexhaustible rumination. From the sideling rhythm of the jaws depends one final blossom” (203). Cited, I think, is the astonishing moment in book 9 of Paradise Lost when Eve returns to tell Adam, who has been weaving a garland for her, that she has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge: “From his slack hand the garland wreathed for Eve / Down drop’d and all the faded roses shed.”33 What initially seems deflating in the allusion— the fumbling hands, the chewing cow, even the wry pun on rumination— makes of the Fall itself the ground for transcendence, turns Adam’s faded roses to the aubade’s “jonquil thunder,” and the passage achieves this feat largely by wagering on the power of sound to seduce. What initially seems discordant—inflated poetic language to describe bestiality and the desire, moreover, of a mentally disabled man—becomes a claim for the transcendent power of poetic language, precisely in its embodiment and sound. When, in Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar, the donkey brays to interrupt Schubert’s A-­major piano sonata, the first time one sees it, it seems comic; that film, however, teaches one to perceive a fundamental continuity between Schubert and the donkey’s bray, so that braying interruption becomes almost unspeakably moving—pointing to the wound that links us to animal life, intimating a link between beauty and what Coetzee’s novel calls disgrace.34 What links the exploration of sense perception to questions of reading—beyond the thematization of reading as an embodied, sensory experi-

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ence—is the foregrounding of ventriloquism, or a lending of voice to the mute. That dynamic—not unrelated, perhaps, to fears of anthropomorphism in discussions of animals and to the vulnerability of any such discussion to charges of sentimentality—is explicitly at issue in Zoo as well.35 One of the film’s most striking formal elements could in fact be called “ventriloquism”: the film severs image and sound. The audio track consists of interviews with the zoos—Coyote, H, and the Happy Horseman—and with Jenny. Only Jenny, her husband (John Edwards), and Coyote agreed to appear on-­screen; Mr. Hands, the other zoos, and most of the others involved are played by actors who never speak. At only one significant moment (an interview with one of the film’s actors) do we see someone talking; otherwise, camera and microphone operate independently. The desynchronizing of image and sound accounts for a large part of the film’s strange beauty, its often unearthly images unfolding as if governed by a temporality different from that of human experience. The editing, moreover, seems to offer figures for this desynchronization: often, visual and audio transitions are staggered, and what we see anticipates or lags behind the words we hear. The moments where the film thematizes our viewing as “virtual”—the linked shots I noted earlier of the mountain view (framed and unframed, subjectively moored and unmoored, moonlit and in daylight), for example—are generated by this desynchronization. That formal desynchronization thus links two different media—and “virtual” experience perhaps offers a way to bring together the different registers of linguistic sound, cinematic vision, and animal movement. To spell out the animal poetics that I believe Zoo ties to a cinematic spectatorship constituted by its desynchronization of image and sound, I would turn to Elizabeth Bishop, whose poems present yet another twentieth-­century bestiary—one thinks of her pink dog, or the seal in “At the Fishhouses” (“he was interested in music”), or of the moose who (to everyone’s “joy”) delays the journey of a Boston-­bound bus. Or one thinks of the exploration, in “The Imaginary Iceberg,” of the transmuting of bodies into art: her seas of shipwreck render a double movement that gives form to an idea, and, turning bones to coral and eyes to pearls, sublimates the body. A large part of the iceberg’s beauty, therefore (why “We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship, / Although it meant the end of travel”), is that it allows us to envision a scene of beauty that there is no one there to see. That exploration culminates in a pun: “icebergs behoove the soul.” The poem’s earlier use of to pasture to convey another change of state (snow to ice) tempts one, that is, to render that line as “icebergs give hooves to the soul.” As in Zoo, an animal

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(or the ghost of a synecdoche of an animal) appears when we contemplate an iceberg that may be imaginary to the extent that the gaze that will see it (“The iceberg cuts its facets from within. / Like jewelry from a grave / it saves itself perpetually and adorns / only itself ”) can belong to no one.36 The consideration of animal suffering in “The Armadillo” renders this effect as an indeterminate gaze. The poem describes a violent confrontation between noncommunicating worlds—worlds of human religious observance (fire balloons honoring a saint) and animal lives (owls, rabbits, armadillos)—that come into contact when a fire balloon falls from the sky. Among other questions, the poem asks whether it is possible to understand another’s suffering—and, more particularly, an animal’s suffering. The confrontation of human meaning and animal life is initially rendered as the difference made for vision by perspective and distance: up close, the balloons look like beating hearts, but “Once up against the sky it’s hard / to tell them from the stars— / planets, that is.”37 Distance and the possibility of distinguishing inside and out in the spectacle of pain become crucial in the poem’s final stanzas:          We saw the pair of owls who nest there flying up and up, their whirling black-­and-­white stained bright pink underneath, until they shrieked up out of sight. The ancient owls’ nest must have burned. Hastily, all alone, a glistening armadillo left the scene, rose-­flecked, head down, tail down, and then a baby rabbit jumped out, short-­eared, to our surprise. So soft!—a handful of intangible ash with fixed, ignited eyes. Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!

The problem of mimicry is (at least) two-­fold: aestheticization threatens to turn pain into spectacle, and distance or perspective threatens to distort

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what one sees. Just as the balloons look like a heart and like planets (which look like stars because, closer to us, they also give us no way to gauge their relative distance) but are neither of these, the images at the end leave one uncertain about “where” to locate the fire. This uncertainty is especially apparent in the “fixed, ignited eyes” of the baby rabbit—are its eyes (as if ) ignited by fear, do its eyes reflect the fire around it, or is the animal literally on fire?—but is also there in the “rose-­flecked” armadillo and “whirling black-­and-­white / stained bright pink underneath” of the owls. In these latter images, too, it is difficult to distinguish a distancing aestheticization (in “rose-­flecked” and “stained bright pink”) from a graphic description of bodily injury (which is also to say that one can’t gauge the distance of the fire from the animals, can’t tell whether one sees a body in pain or a reflection of light). That uncertainty is staged as a drama “in” the spectators, where cognition (in the startling exclamations “short-­eared, to our surprise” and “so soft!”) seems to lag behind what it sees—as if there were an immediate bodily reaction (“so soft!”) that is then corrected when the mind realizes what it has “grasped” (a handful of intangible ash). Or perhaps what it has failed to grasp, what it could not fail to imagine it had touched but nevertheless had not touched. (Yet again: is it “intangible” because it is too far away, because it is incomprehensible, or because it has literally been burned up?) With the turn of the last stanza from narrative to apostrophe, the questions of distance and perspective are redoubled (and linked to voice). Addressed are not the animals but images of the mind—forms themselves of too pretty, dreamlike mimicry. An image for human impotence in the face of such disaster (and the poem is often read in relation to the deaths of “innocents” in incendiary bombing), it is also an image for the equivocal projection of human affect that makes such anthropomorphizing reading possible—a gaze that sees the armadillo’s shell as like armor and its body, rolled up, as like a fist, and a gaze sufficiently identified with the spectacle to feel that fist as “weak” but distanced enough to see it as “ignorant.” In other terms, it isn’t clear whether the weakness here is a bodily fragility (shared with animals) in an inhospitable world or an inability (separating us from animals) to stop making images (beautiful images, but also images that remake the suffering of animals into pain that mimics our own), a cognitive weakness that distances us, culpably, from the suffering of others. The possibility of getting “inside” the spectacle—either by experiencing the suffering or making it fully an image for a human predicament—is cast as an uncertain locus of perception: we are left without grounds for deciding

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whether “against the sky” means “in opposition or in defiance of [what is meted out from above by an indifferent or malignant fate]” or (like the fire balloons earlier that look like stars) “seen silhouetted against.” The closing image both freights the image with affect and distances us from it, turns it into shape or form seen against a background—which is also to say leaves in question where the images are seen from. Bishop thus formulates more lucidly a drama of uncertain agency that one suspects is partly what incites panic in those who contemplate both bestiality and digital technologies. These literary examples should make clear that Zoo’s reticence about representing sex with animals—its rendering of that sexuality as a mode of cinematic gazing and as a form (the quintessential form, even) of “digital desire”—is not simply evasive, nor does it sidestep ethical questions around bestiality. Its form is a mode of ethical inquiry, and of desire, and the film articulates these by presenting a birth of sight that makes uncertain the locus of the vision thus born. I noted earlier that, at the opening of the film, the camera travels out of an underground mine; the sound of a modem encourages us to read this image as identifying a zoo’s discovery of his desires (and of a community to foster them) with the traveling of information along a telephone wire. An image for the film’s “virtuality,” it also figures a birth of sight—which similar effects throughout the film suggest is one of its recurrent preoccupations: the camera’s movement forward or backward in a darkened room, toward or away from a brighter exterior, makes the light, and effectively the entire visual frame, expand or contract. Often, too, the camera follows figures out of darkened rooms into bright exteriors. Such images evoke the aubade of Ike Snopes’s bovine idyll; repeatedly, the film seems to represent vision coming into being. That is also to say that vision is made visible. If one watched Zoo without its soundtrack, one might imagine it was a road movie: repeatedly we see roads stretching away in front of or receding behind traveling vehicles (cars, buses, horse trailers). There is a pleasure in movement or embodiment in these shots, a pleasure not unrelated, perhaps, to their metafilmic or metavisual quality. The long shots of roads look “composed” because they give a vanishing point to orient the perspective. Usually, moreover, they are, like the shot of the moon out the window of the house, framed: we can see the (relatively darker) inside of the vehicle or trailer—a frame that therefore also doubles as an image for the camera’s own framing of the view. In one particularly beautiful shot, a bus turns a corner so that the sun suddenly hits the windshield and makes it visible. Within the shot of a

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lovely late afternoon in a small town, it is as if the frame and the camera’s lens came into view. If such shots offer an image for vision, most of them posit no viewer other than the camera. Coyote is on the bus, for example, but it is explicitly not his view we see; likewise, the view out the back of the trailer could be a horse’s, but it occurs before the trailer has picked up any horse to see it. The film repeatedly presents the birth of sensation, but, curiously, it seems not to be the sensation of anyone in particular. The “framing” here could thus offer a way to think about Zoo’s thematization of the virtual. I have written elsewhere that when Stanley Cavell notes at the beginning of The World Viewed that the screen does not have a frame but rather is a frame, his pun suggests a topography of impersonal viewing in cinema: “The frame that forms the painting’s edge—its outside, but also its communication with its context as viewed—becomes, in the frames that form the moving image, internal to that image. The segments separating still frames become invisible in the projection but thereby enter into the filmic image—and enter it as a kind of blindness, our blindness, perhaps, paradoxically visible as the world viewed.”38 Seen in this context, it is striking that Zoo is as preoccupied with blindness as it is with vision—and not simply insofar as many shots are almost too dark to see and, in many others, the extreme contrast of light to dark makes much of the frame invisible. Repeatedly, for instance, we are shown people closing their eyes in sleep. One of the film’s more baffling sequences presents an interview with the actor (Michael Minard) hired to play “Cop #1.” Seated in a bright white space empty of any objects, the actor describes his audition in tedious detail (his difficulties finding parking and so on). At first, the obvious self-­reflexive device, which makes the film’s own production part of the story, produces a lame effort at connection: the actor was once at a baseball game from which an ambulance took another man to the hospital where Mr. Hands died. Yet the thought that “that hit close to home” leads him to a memory of seeing— in his grotesque phrase—a “corpse that a few minutes before had been a seven-­year-­old boy.” Looking into the eyes of the drowned boy, the man reports, “all’s I saw was my own reflection.” One then notices that the entire sequence is punctuated by intervals of a black screen—moments, therefore, where the camera is blind and where that blindness turns the screen to a mirror. That the sex with horses is shown to be unwatchable seems therefore to be motivated by more than a prohibition on depicting that particular act. Jenny’s description of the sensual pleasure of being with the horses (“she

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was my legs. She was my heart that didn’t beat right”) suggests that we view the many scenes of “pure vision” as representations of intimacy with horses—most striking, perhaps, are a series of slow-­motion shots as the zoos walk through an orchard at night, but one would also include, among others, shots of roads, of the moon, of the vast horizon around the various farms, of Seattle at night. If the many metavisual moments in the film thus offer figures for that intimacy, the most extended, explicit discussion of zoophilic sex understands it as an escape from human complexity: “You’re connecting with another intelligent being who is very happy to participate, be involved. You’re not going to be able to ask it about the latest Madonna album; it has no idea what Tolstoy is, or Keats. You can’t discuss the difference between Manet and Picasso. That just doesn’t exist for their world. It’s a simpler, very plain world, and for those few moments you can kind of get disconnected.” The speaker goes on to assert that the sex is painless and— more important—that no one is drugged or coerced. The speech is accompanied by slow-­motion images of the man walking through the orchard at night, and the saturated color and texture of the shots seem to offer a visual analogue for the simpler life of sensation he describes. One of the more beautiful shots in this sequence shows the man’s feet as he walks across a moonlit orchard strewn with flower blossoms. The mention of Keats makes it (almost) inevitable that one think of “Ode to a Nightingale”: I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,    Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs. But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet    Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-­tree wild.39

It is as if the camera felt compelled to offer an image both for that simpler world and of the poem whose relevance to it the interviewed zoo has just denied. The man’s pastoralizing account of sex with animals (he makes sex with a horse sound like a walk in the park) is not exactly contradicted or is as if contradicted by a poem that explores the equivocal commerce between nature and literary tradition in the context of a—willed, and to the extent that it is willed, perhaps baffled—dissolution of the self. The violence perhaps elided in that poem’s fantasy of dissolution (the absence, that is, of the story of Procne and Philomena) is made explicit in one of the most visually beautiful and disturbing moments in Zoo (a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for). In it, Jenny describes a blind horse named Chance (a story probably

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also motivated by a memory of Equus), who kept poking himself in the eye foraging for food among blackberry bushes: “We ultimately had to remove both of his eyes because he had reinjured himself so many times.” In the beautiful shots of blackberry bushes that accompany this story, streaming sunlight illumines both fruit and thorns. What initially seems highly aestheticized images designed to distance one from the horrific story that occasions them begins to seem more complicated when we realize that the luscious blackberries are no more accessible to us than they were to the horse. Less so, in fact: our exemption from his blindness comes at the cost of our distancing from his sensual experience—the experience claimed by the zoos—and his blindness, visible, is our sight. Bestiality is unwatchable in a literal sense. When Stevens writes in “The Rock” of “a blindness cleaned . . . in a birth of sight,” it is perhaps unclear whether he means a blindness cured or a blindness made visible.40 Zoo gives us the birth of sensation as a merger with a seeing world, a merger that might best be rendered as blindness. Such is, I think, what it is to see that one does not see the sex in Zoo: a destitution that, explored by Disgrace, is rendered in different ways as an embodied experience of reading in Stevens and Bishop. The film’s depiction of animal life is thus linked to its formal characteristics—the sensual experience, one might say, of watching the film. However fortuitously motivated by various practical contingencies, the desynchronizing of sound and image in Zoo—which makes it, like The Hamlet, an exploration of ventriloquism—evokes what Cavell (in his discussion of so-­called silent cinema and the advent of the talkie) calls “the acknowledgment of silence,”41 where silence (which he often figures in terms of embodiment) evinces a fundamental asynchronicity in experience that drives apart intelligibility and conviction, an asynchronicity that means that human experience escapes human language and meaning. I have tried to link that escape to animal life and to the moment when poetic meaning passes into animal movement or sound. By rendering the birth of vision as the birth of the world’s becoming-­visible, the moments in Faulkner and Stevens evoke this “formal excess” in Zoo insofar as they body forth a birth of sensation on the verge of becoming articulate. If in zoophilia the Internet gives birth to a new sexual identity, that crossing with technology potentially codifies a disappearing subject. At least insofar as this remarkable film understands it, the form of desire thus fostered points to a destitution of the subject whose rigors the various putatively moral categories through which it has been examined might serve, above all, to evade. Pairing a birth of vision with an unwatch-

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able spectacle, Zoo suggests a birth of vision that is a blindness cleaned, a mode of viewing in which, to the extent that it truly sees, there may be no one there to do the seeing. Notes Special thanks to David Kurnick, with whom I first saw Zoo, and to Ellis Hanson, James Krasner, and Laura Tanner. The line of thought I pursue here is indebted (in “untouchable” ways) to Daniel Heller-­Roazen’s The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2006). 1 Alfred Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), 668. Quoted in Marjorie Garber, Dog Love (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 149. 2 Richard Brody, “The Film File: Zoo (2007),” New Yorker, April 30, 2007, www.new yorker.com/arts/reviews/film/zoo_2007_devor#ixzz0o4LRegtr. Ross Douthat condemned both the film (which he seems not to have seen) and its critics. To David Edelstein (“I don’t see the point of making an anti-­horse-­fucking film,” he writes, rather reasonably; “let them make their case”), Douthat responds: “But if you let them make their case without a frame of sanity . . . then you aren’t just letting them explain what they did; you’re endorsing it. And so are the critics who praise this movie.” Ross Douthat, “All Creatures Great and Small,” Atlantic, April 26, 2007, http://rossdouthat .theatlantic.com/archives/2007/04/horseplay.php; and David Edelstein, review of Zoo, New York Magazine, n.d., http://nymag.com/movies/listings/rv_57103.htm (accessed May 22, 2010). 3 The association of animals and homosexuality goes back, John Boswell suggests, at least to the Epistle of Barnabas and its use by the church fathers to link Mosaic dietary prohibitions with sexual sins. See John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the 14th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 137–43. 4 Ralph McInerny, “Animal Husbandry,” The Catholic Thing, September 3, 2008, www .thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=469&Item id=2. Ellen DeGeneres’s wedding is treated with withering—well, withering something: “Who has not thrilled to that white-­clad couple smiling radiantly at America, including us all in this historic cultural breakthrough? . . . I heard a rustic from Iowa ask, ‘But what do they do?’ I suggested that he keep a sharper eye on his herd of cows and he might learn a thing or two, but silly as the question seems, it deserves a serious answer, and it is this. Ellen and her beloved provide venereal pleasure to one another by any means they choose.” That last phrase seems to make utopian claims for the malleability of the body’s experience of desire that few queer theorists would dare embrace. (Eavesdropping on a rustic: the alternatives made visible by McInerny’s effort to write Virgil for Dummies—a not dissimilar structure, when transplanted from Arcadia to Iowa and to the lips of a notably less well-­informed rustic, producing not poetry but sexual moralism, proud, as always, to announce what it is unable to imagine—are not entirely irrelevant to my reading of Zoo.) 5 William F. Jasper, “From Homosexual Marriage to Bestiality,” thenewamerican.com,

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September 8, 2008, www.thenewamerican.com/culture/family/337–from-­homosexual-­ marriage-­to-­bestiality. Reviewers repeatedly invoked consent. In Zoo, the connection is made by Washington senator Pam Roach, who, in the wake of the Enumclaw scandal, proposed a bill (eventually enacted) prohibiting acts of bestiality: “Children cannot consent. They’re innocent. So are animals. They cannot consent, and they’re innocent.” Here and throughout, all quotations from Zoo (Los Angeles: Velocity/Thinkfilm, 2007), DVD. On gay animals, see Jennifer Terry, “‘Unnatural Acts’ in Nature: The Scientific Fascination with Queer Animals,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6.2 (2000): 151–93; Susan McHugh, “Queer (and) Animal Theories,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15.1 (2009): 153–69; and Georgia Warnke, “Sex and Science,” in After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 120–52. My formulations of the simplifications of animal sex are indebted to McHugh and Warnke. For an instance of popular journalism about gay animals, see Jon Mooallem, “Can Animals Be Gay?” New York Times, March 29, 2010, www.nytimes.com/ 2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-­t.html. On childhood sexuality, see Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Ohi, “Molestation 101: Child Abuse, Homophobia, and the Boys of St. Vincent,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6.2 (2000): 195–248. For fascinating (and much more complicated) accounts of same-­sex sex acts among animals, see Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); and Marlene Zuk, Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn about Sex from Animals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-­Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), 149–81; Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003). As Peter Bradshaw writes: “Perhaps most importantly, it is a film about the internet . . . and about how the net has created new modes of communication, new forms of identity, new private communities and new shared activities that were unthinkable before. It gives rise to the same debate . . . [as] exploitative pornography: awful thoughts that might once have remained fleeting, private, unexamined, and to all intents and purposes non-­existent, can now be acted upon. And this creates the landscape that Zoo shows us. It is the cyber-­landscape of the web that makes this sort of connection possible: discreet, hyper-­instantaneous, amoral. This is the arena in which the bizarre zoophiliac community can exist, and it is like an alien planet, without the gravitational forces of disapproval or disgust, still less any basic sense of cruelty to animals. . . . Devor uses the possibilities of cinema to circumvent revulsion and shed light on the farthest reaches of psychology and technology.” Bradshaw, review of Zoo, Guardian (London), May 30, 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/may/30/documentary .drama. William Jasper again: “As far back as 1990, the National Endowment for the Arts provided a $15,000 grant (courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers) for an exhibit by homo-

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sexual ‘artist’ David Wojnarowicz that included explicit pictures of bestiality. Since then, the Internet has become the cloaca maxima of pansexual vice, providing a path to ‘normalcy’ for every deviant behavior. Many websites boast videos of human-­animal sex acts and provide forums for zoophiles . . . to share their perverse experiences.” Jasper, “From Homosexual Marriage to Bestiality.” See Andrea Beetz, “Bestiality/Zoophilia: A Scarcely Investigated Phenomenon Between Crime, Paraphilia, and Love,” Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice 4.2 (2004): 1–36, esp. 28–29; and Colin J. Williams and Martin S. Weinberg, “Zoophilia in Men: A Study of Sexual Interest in Animals,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 32.6 (2003): 523–35, esp. 526 and 531. These social scientists also note that the Internet allows them to observe zoophilia in ways that would have been impossible before its advent. McInerny, “Animal Husbandry.” Peter Singer, “Heavy Petting,” review of Midas Dekkers, Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, Nerve.com, March 1, 2001, www.nerve.com/opinions/singer/heavypetting. Norah Vincent writes: “When someone has sex with an animal, he foists himself on a creature that has the mental and emotional capacity of a child. Thus, it is no more capable than a child of giving meaningful consent. So when Singer argues that there is such a thing as cruelty-­free bestiality . . . he does so by ignoring the obvious truth that if you have had sex with someone who is constitutionally incapable of giving anything that might constitute meaningful consent, you have committed rape.” Vincent, “You’re an Animal: Bestiality and Bioethicist Peter Singer,” Village Voice, March 27, 2001, www .villagevoice.com/2001–03–27/nyc-­life/you-­re-­an-­animal/1. I make this argument about consent in greater detail in “Voyeurism and Annunciation in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 51.4 (2009): 521–57. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). The film’s reticence is the more striking in that this footage is readily available on the Internet (a Google search for “mrhands.mpg” will turn it up); to my eye, the oblique glimpses we get in Zoo are of the actual video. I am indebted for this last point to Ellis Hanson, who also pointed out to me that a comparison to the film and play Equus—a precursor that Zoo is very conscious of and which is, unlike Zoo, very much interested in psychological explanations—would be one way to make apparent the originality of Devor’s film in this regard. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999), 6. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. William Faulkner, The Hamlet: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 206. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. On dignity, see Agamben, “Without Rank,” The Open, 29–31. Lösung is also the German word for the final solution; Coetzee’s comparisons of animal suffering to the Holocaust have been controversial (and he depicts such comparisons as controversial in Elizabeth Costello [New York: Penguin, 1990]). See Ian Hacking, “Conclusion: Deflections,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, ed. Stanley Cavell et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 154. Wallace Stevens, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1954), 92.

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Other instances are not in the first person—“usurped,” for example, as completing the action of “usurped upon” (Disgrace, 21), or “the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt” (71). That latter case returns at the end, when Lurie says that, after the dog has died, he will “fold him up and pack him away in his bag, and the next day wheel the bag into the flames and see that it is burnt, burnt up” (219–20). Nora Volkow quoted in Matt Richtel, “Attached to Technology and Paying a Price,” New York Times, June 6, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain .html?fta=y. Merriam-­Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., s.v. “queer.” Jonah Goldberg and Nick Schulz, “Gated or X-­Rated? The Internet Has Room for More Than One Virtual Neighborhood,” National Review, July 19, 2010, 35; available at www .nationalreview.com/articles/243449/gated-­or-­x-­rated-­jonah-­goldberg. Elizabeth Bishop, “The Map,” in The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983), 3. Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning,” in Collected Poems, 66–71. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), book 2, lines 885–88. Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, 74. Ibid., 78. See also Cora Diamond, “Injustice and Animals,” in Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics, ed. Carl Elliott (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 118–48; Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People,” in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 319–34; and Diamond, “Experimenting on Animals: A Problem in Ethics,” in The Realistic Spirit, 335–65. Milton, Paradise Lost, book 9, lines 892–93. Au hasard Balthazar, dir. Robert Bresson, 1966. On sentimentality and the lending of voice to the mute (and its potential erotics), see Kevin Ohi, “Sentimentality, Desire, and Aestheticism in Lolita,” in Innocence and Rapture, 155–90. Elizabeth Bishop, “Pink Dog,” 190–91; “At the Fishhouses,” 64–66; “The Moose,” 169–73; and “The Imaginary Iceberg,” 4, all in Complete Poems. Elizabeth Bishop, “The Armadillo,” in Complete Poems, 103–4. Ohi, “Voyeurism and Annunciation,” 537; there, I make the argument about impersonal viewing in greater detail—suggesting that, against many understandings of the gendering of cinematic vision, voyeurism is the effort to see the world without oneself in it. On the “frame” of film, see Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 23–25. John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale,” in Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 206. Wallace Stevens, “The Rock,” in Collected Poems, 525–28, 526. Cavell, The World Viewed, 146–61.

A G A I N S T the D A Y

Liberal War Brad Evans, Editor

A G A I N S T the D A Y

Michael Hardt Note from the Editor

​In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the South Atlantic Quarterly

organized a special issue focused not on the attacks themselves but on the U.S. government’s social, political, and military projects that were instituted in response, including a “war on terror,” foreign invasions and occupations, torture and extralegal imprisonments, an expanding security apparatus, domestic attacks on civil rights, the curtailing of free speech, racist attacks on minorities, and the increasing militarization of society. The issue, “Dissent from the Homeland” (Spring 2002), edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, sought to challenge and critique the political tide of the time. To commemorate the ten-­year anniversary of the attacks, SAQ asked the authors in this section of Against the Day to analyze one important development that has characterized the decade: the increasingly close relationship between liberal politics and war making. War, they argue, has traditionally been conceived as anathema to liberalism. Liberal politics addresses domestic and foreign conflicts primarily through open dialogue and negotiation, with the use of arms only as a last resort. Today we face instead a liberal politics that, despite the indelibility of this pacific image, is constantly engaged in warfare: an armed liberalism, a liberal way of war. This political and military formation, which certainly did not begin with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon but has been radically intensifying during the subsequent decade, forces us to reconsider our understandings of both liberalism and warfare. It remains one aftermath of September 11 with which we must contend.

The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:3, Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-1275761 © 2011 Duke University Press

A G A I N S T the D A Y

Brad Evans The Liberal War Thesis: Introducing the Ten Key Principles of Twenty-­First-­Century Biopolitical Warfare

When the historian Sir Michael Howard delivered the prestigious Tre-

velyan lectures at Cambridge University in 1987, he posed one of the most pertinent questions of our times: what is the relationship between liberalism and war?1 For many, the fact that this question was posed at all represented a remarkable political departure. In international politics, liberalism has conventionally been associated with the Kant-­inspired virtues of perpetual peace, along with the commitment to uphold human rights and justice. Preaching peaceful cohabitation among the world of peoples, liberal advocates have therefore made claim to the superiority of their enlightened praxis on the basis that they enjoy a monopoly on the terms global security, peace, and prosperity. While liberals take this for granted, for Howard therein lay the dilemma: despite being shrouded in universalist and pacifist discourse, liberal practice has actually been marked historically by war and violence. Howard’s concern, not unlike criticisms of Carl Schmitt’s, was clear: “His target was the way in which the liberal universalization of war in pursuit of perpetual peace impacted on the heterogeneous and adversarial character of international politics, translating war into crusades with only one of two outcomes: endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cultures.”2 Despite the importance of Howard’s initial provocation, he nevertheless failed to come to terms with the exact nature of liberal war-­making efforts. He merely chided liberals for their naive faith in the human spirit,

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which, although admirable, was at best idealistic and at worst dangerous. Liberalism is not simply a set of ideals; neither is it some conscience of the political spirit. Liberalism is a regime of power that wages the destiny of the species on the success of its own political strategies. Before we map the implications of this for our understanding of war, an important point of clarification should be made. Unlike reified attempts in international relations thinking to offer definitive truths about war, what I present here as the liberal war thesis does not pretend to explain every single conflict. It does not deny the existence of geostrategic battles, and neither does it deny the fact that any single war can reveal a number of competing motivations. Like security, war can be written and strategically waged in many different ways depending on the key strategic referent. Wars can be multiple. So what, then, makes a war liberal? Here I offer ten fundamental tenets that set liberal war apart from conventional political struggles: 1. Liberal wars are fought over the modalities of life itself. Liberalism is undoubtedly a complex historical phenomenon, but if there is one defining singularity to its war-­making efforts, then it is the underlying biopolitical imperative, which justifies its actions in relation to the protection and advancement of modes of existence. Liberals continuously draw reference to life to justify military force.3 War, if there is to be one, must be for the protection and improvement of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favor. More recently, for instance, it has underwritten the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation that is seen to offer a more humane and locally sensitive response.4 If liberal peace can therefore be said to imply something more than the mere absence of war, so it is the case that liberal war is immeasurably more complex than the simple presence of military hostilities. With war appearing integral to the logic of peace insofar as it conditions the very possibility of liberal rule, humanity’s most meaningful expression actually appears through the battles fought in its name. It would be incorrect, however, to think that this logic represents a recent departure.5 Life has always been the principal object for liberal political strategies. Hence, while the liberal way of rule is by definition biopolitical, as it revolves around the problems posed by species life, so it is the case that liberal ways of war are inherently biopolitical, as they, too, are waged over the same productive properties that life is said to possess. The reason contemporary forms of conflict are therefore seen to be emergent, complex, nonlinear, and adaptive is not incidental. Mirroring the new social morphology of life, the changing nature of conflict is preceded by the changing ontological account of species being that appears exponen-

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tially more powerful precisely because it is said to display post-­Newtonian qualities. 2. Liberal wars operate within a global imaginary of threat. Ever since Immanuel Kant imagined the autonomous individual at peace with the wider political surroundings, the liberal subject has always been inserted into a more expansive terrain of productive cohabitation that is potentially free of conflict. While this logic has been manifest through local systems of liberal power throughout its history, during the 1990s a global imaginary of threat appeared that directly correlated liberal forms of governance with less planetary endangerment. This ability to collapse the local into the global resulted in an unrivaled moment of liberal expansionism.6 Such expansion did not, however, result from some self-­professed planetary commitment to embrace liberal ideals. Liberal interventionism proceeded instead on the basis that localized emergency and crises demanded response. Modes of incorporation were therefore justified on the grounds that although populations still exist beyond the liberal pale, for their own betterment they should be included. This brings us to the martial face of liberal power. While liberalism is directly fueled by the universal belief in the righteousness of its mission, since there is no universally self-­evident allegiance to the project, war is necessarily universalized in its pursuit of peace: “However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims.”7 3. Liberal wars take place by “other” means. Liberalism declares otherness to be the problem to be solved. The theory of race dates back to canonical figures like Kant, John Locke, and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, whose progressive account of life originally conceived of noble savagery. While this desire to subjugate “the other” is a permanent feature of liberal biopolitics, the idea of human security that emerged in the early 1990s instilled it directly into policies that sought to pacify the global borderland.8 Directly challenging the conventional notion of state-­based security, human security discourses found a remedial solution to the problem of maladjustment in sustainable development. This led to the effective “capitalization of peace,” since conflict and instability became fully aligned with the dangers of underdevelopment. Inverting then Carl von Clausewitz’s formula

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that war represents a continuation of politics by other means, war-­making efforts were increasingly tasked with providing lasting capacities for social cohesion and peace. Liberal ways of war and development thus became part of the same global strategic continuum. While it could be argued that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 concern with sovereign recovery unsettled this narrative by giving sure primacy to military force, the contemporary postinterventionary phase of liberal occupation signals its effective reawakening. The veritable displacement of the figuration of the terrorist by the body of the insurgent is fully revealing of this strategic reprioritization.9 Unlike the problem of terrorism that is a problem of (dis)order, insurgents are a problem of population whose violence is the product of causal resentment. Their resistance pertains from unfortunate locally regressive conditions that can be manipulated to resuscitate the vitality of local life systems. Since insurgencies then are open to remedy and demand engagement, like the savages of the colonial encounter, they are otherwise redeemable. 4. Liberal wars take place at a distance. The Clausewitzean inversion identified above does not simply incorporate every aspect of civic governance into the global war effort. Since the unity of life incorporates every political strategy into a planetwide battle, the destiny of the species as a whole is wagered on the success (or failure) of its own political strategies. As recent liberal incursions make clear, however, global war cannot be sustained by relying on interventionary forces. Not only do such interventions lead to localized resistance, but the relationships to violence they expose are politically unsustainable. Waging war at a distance is the favored policy choice. This policy of getting savages to fight barbarians in the global borderlands involves a broad range of interconnected strategies.10 These include the abandonment of political neutralities; arming and training of local militias; instilling the correct political architecture to prevent credible political opposition; funding development projects that have a distinct liberal agenda; and marginalizing any community that has the temerity to support political alternatives. This distancing does not simply reveal the microphysics of liberal biopolitical rule. Creating conditions wherein the active production of all compliant life-­sustaining flows (biopoliticized circulations) does not jeopardize the veritable containment of others, liberal war makes possible the global partitioning of life. This is not simply about security understood in the conventional sovereign sense of upholding territorial integrities. It is about deciding what must be made to live and what must be allowed to perish in the global space of flows. 5. Liberal wars have a distinct relationship to territory insomuch as spa-

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tiality is firmly bound to active living space. Liberal power triangulates security, populations, and territory in a way that binds geostrategic concerns to the active production of ways of life.11 Through the capitalization of peace, this triangulation has gone global as the management of local resources has become a planetary security concern. The development-­security nexus tied the dramatic materialization of life to conditions of social cohesion. More recently, it has widened its security ambit to include protection of the environment and climate adaptation strategies. Leading to the generalization of liberal biopolitical rule, the development-­environment-­security nexus (DESNEX) is now part of a mobilization for war on all fronts—from human to biospheric.12 As the security apparatus of a new liberal environmentalism, DESNEX is no longer satisfied with policing and maintaining the life chances between the globally enriched and the globally denied. This is a highly politicized maneuver predicated on the geographical containment of the poor and dispossessed. It is forging a new global settlement around the control and management of the biosphere. A new speciation of global life is therefore taking place according to its ability to properly manage and care for the environment and, at the same time, maintain capitalist accumulation. For DESNEX, containment is now not enough—a locked-­in global poor must be made fit for such stewardship. 6. Liberal wars are wars of law. One of liberal power’s foundational myths is its commitment to law. Constitutional law is presented as being the natural foundation for any civilized society. Without this arrangement, the concept of “a people”—understood to be a legally binding community of political beings—appears to hold no meaning. A people, however, is never made by laws. Neither are laws politically neutral. Whatever the jurisdiction, laws are enacted in a highly tactical way largely in response to crises that are never value free. This brings us to the problem of the norm. Advocates of liberal war reconcile their commitment to law by relating juridical safeguards to agreed normative standards. Norms as such appear to be the logical outcome of reasoned political settlement. Our discourse of battle, however, appreciates that power defines the norm such that those who deviate from it pose a threat to the biological heritage of life. The norm is another way of suppressing political differences. There are then no universal, all-­embracing, value-­neutral, timeless, or eternal a priori norms that inhibit some purified and objective existential space where they await access by the learned justices of the peace. There is no absolute convergence point to human reason. Every norm is simply the outcome of a particular power struggle. Its inscription always follows the contingency of the crisis event.

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That is why no universalizing system of law can ever account for or suppress the particular calls for justice that directly challenge moral authority. When Philip Bobbitt advocates for a more tactical and strategic approach to law, he is not calling for some neorealist revival.13 He is simply asking for liberal market states to be more efficient and effective in response to those problems than they now are. 7. Liberal wars move beyond states of exception to take place within a condition of unending emergency. Walter Benjamin warned that while exceptional moments of crisis were politically dangerous, the effective normalization of rule could be far more sinister. With order finally restored, what previously shattered the boundaries of acceptability now begins to reside in the undetected fabric of the everyday. Ours is no longer a time of exception. What marks the contemporary period is terrifyingly normal. While there is no law without enforcement, no enforceability exists without intimate relation to crisis.14 Every law and every decision respond to an exceptional moment. It brings force to bear on what breaks from the norm to rework the basis of normality anew. There is therefore no pure theory of the exception, no absolute break from law. Law reserves the right to transgress its own foundations, where it encounters continuously emerging crises, untimely moments that require varying degrees of intensity in the subsequent deployment of force. It is no surprise, then, to find that states of exception are all too frequent once the broad sweep of liberal history is considered. Not only do crises permit the reworking of the boundaries of existence, but the fluctuating shift from (dis)ordered sovereign recovery (external modes of capture) to progressive security governance (internal modes of interventionism) defines the liberal encounter. 8. Liberal wars depoliticize within the remit of humanitarian discourses and practices. Even when some epiphenomenal tension exists, the inclusive image of thought invoked by liberals immediately internalizes the order of battle. This is no mere sovereign affair. Liberal war has always been immeasurably greater than the juridical problem of order.15 It has always pertained to the life and death of the species. Since what is at stake in contemporary theaters of war is the “West’s ability to contain and manage international poverty while maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume beyond its means,” each crisis of global circulation marks out a terrain of “global civil war, or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the modalities of life itself.”16 With depoliticization therefore occurring when life is primed for its own betterment—that is, within humanitarian discourses and practices—it is possible to offer an alternative reflection on

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Giorgio Agamben’s bare life. Agamben’s notion of bare life draws on sovereign terms of engagement. Life becomes exposed on account of its abandonment from law. The biopolitical encounter in contrast denies political quality, as the “bare essentials” for species survival take precedence. No longer reduced bare in a juridical sense of the term, life is stripped bare since its maladjusted qualities impede productive salvation. Hence, while this life is equally assumed to be without meaningful political quality— though in this instance because of some dangerous lack of fulfillment— allowing the body’s restitution displaces exceptional politics by the no less imperial and no less politically charged bare activity of species survival. 9. Liberal wars are intimately bound to the active production of political subjectivities. Security discourses have always had a particular affinity with political authenticity, which sets out who we are as people and defines what we are to become. It places limits around what it means to think and act politically. The liberal approach to security implies that political authenticity is not simply tied to those identity formations defined by epiphenomenal tension. It breaks free of such static demarcations. The liberal subject instead is constructed by living freely through contingent threats to insecurities around its existence. Within a broader and more positive continuum of endangerment, liberal subjectivity has never been in crises, if we understand those to be the disruptions to fixed modes of being. Born of the paradoxically anxious conditions of its ongoing emergence, the liberal subject is the subject of crises. It lives and breathes through the continual disruption to its own static modes of recovery. While this subject has gone through many key changes, the disrupted subject is made real today on account of its need to be resilient. Again this does not infer a static state of ontological affairs. Resilient life must uphold the principles of adaptation and change held true by our radically interconnected age. Since what is dangerous today is seen as integral to the very life processes that sustain liberal life, danger is directly related to the radically contingent outcomes on which the vitality of existence is said to depend. With liberal societies having to endure what has been termed the “permanent emergency of its own emergence,”17 our predisposition to the unknowable contingency of every new encounter—the event of contemporary life itself—appears at the same time to be the source of our potential richness and the beginning of all our despairs. 10. Liberal wars are profoundly ontotheological. When Barack Obama reconciled the problem of “evil” with the “imperfections of man” in his Nobel laureate speech, he reaffirmed the Kantian belief that evil is very

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much part of this world—not that people are born of evil but that unnecessary suffering results from bad or dangerous political judgment.18 Offering then a humanistic reworking of the story of the fall—one in which life, always assumed to be perpetually guilty of its own (un)making, must continually seek its own recovery from the ashes of its own potential demise— we uncover why sovereignty is not the transcendental frame of reference for liberal power.19 Kant-­inspired liberalism preaches universality but accepts that the universal is beyond the realms of lived experience. It preaches the international virtues of law but accepts that one’s encounter with moral law has to be contingent. It insists on life’s autonomy even though it offers an account of freedom in which humankind has fallen to the guilt of its own unmaking. It promotes human progress yet puts forward the thesis of infinite regress to highlight humankind’s imperfections. And it claims that all life has an original predisposition to good and a simultaneous propensity to evil. Liberal life is forced to endure a self-­imposed temporal purgatory— life is always guilty of the moral deficiencies of the past, yet incapable of exorcising them in the future. These imperfections are actually demanded so that the antiproductive body can prove its moral and political worth. While this morally deficient default setting invariably moves us beyond any metaphysical attachment to the humanitarian principle (humanity is after all too flawed to become the unifying principle) and while the power of law alone is insufficient to overcome the imperfections of modern people, faith is restored by something in the order of the divine economy of life itself. One could argue here that contemporary liberalism is in itself facing terminal crises. Whatever one’s opinions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is clear that Western populations have no taste for new forms of military interventionism and lasting engagement in the global borderlands. And whether one considers a resurgent socialism in Latin America, the emergence of new forms of capitalization by alternative geopolitical powers, the changing nature of religious movements that have used democratic procedures to their own political advantage, or the continuation of indigenous struggles that challenge any hold over the terms rights, freedom, democracy, and justice, liberalism appears to be operating within a declining zone of political influence. As recent events in Libya illustrate, however, we must be wary of signaling its lasting demise. Throughout modern history, liberalism has proved to be resilient when faced with its own crises of legitimacy and authority. Its claims to violence in particular seem to enjoy a remarkable ability to regenerate as the memory of indigenous subjugation and depoliticization fades with time. One could be more cynical and

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suggest that given the only things that liberal regimes in Western zones of affluence can materially export today are war and violence, rather than write of its demise, the liberal war thesis is only beginning to enter a new retrenching chapter, which will resonate for a considerable time. Each of the essays in this Against the Day section looks to the new political contours of the liberal war thesis. Highlighting in particular the spatial, subjective, and ontotheological stakes, Mark Duffield, Julian Reid, and Michael Dillon provide new critical reflections on the nature of twenty-­ first-­century biopolitical warfare. Around 2000, it was clear that our understanding of conflict needed to move beyond the highly reductionist state-­ centric frames that dominated conventional discourse. While the authors here take up this challenge, the principal message—that life will continue to fight to retain its radical otherness—continues to escape liberal theorists and practitioners. In spite of the professed desire to make the world habitable, the political as a function of difference still appears to require resolution. Offering, then, a Kantian notion of enmity through which all life is seen to be guilty of its own (un)making, the wholesale transformation of societies continues to be justified without exception. War has therefore become increasingly normalized, such that it either is waged in the name of planetary peace or does not even register without our critical referents. Until we appreciate that the world consists of subjects who are willing to defend their radical otherness, peaceful cohabitation will continue to elude us. Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8

Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London: Routledge, 2009), 5. Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-­building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan (London: Vintage, 2003). David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2006). Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). Human Security Centre, The Human Security Report 2005: War and Peace in the 21st Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War, 7. Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

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Brad Evans and Colleen Bell, “Terrorism to Insurgency: Mapping the Post-­Intervention Security Terrain,” Journal of Intervention and State Building 4.4 (2010): 9–28. Mark Duffield, “Getting Savages to Fight Barbarians: Development, Security and the Colonial Present,” Conflict, Security and Development 5.2 (2005): 141–59. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977– 1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Macmillan, 2007). Brad Evans and Mark Duffield, “Biospheric Security: How the Merger between Development, Security and the Environment (DESENEX) Is Retrenching Fortress Europe,” in A Threat against Europe? Security, Migration and Integration, ed. Peter Burgess and Serge Gutwirth (Brussels: VUB Press, forthcoming). Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-­first Century (New York: Penguin, 2008). Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Brad Evans, “Foucault’s Legacy: Security, War and Violence in the 21st Century,” Security Dialogue 41.4 (2010): 413–33. Mark Duffield, “Global Civil War: The Non-­Insured, International Containment and Post-­interventionary Society,” Journal of Refugee Studies 21.2 (2008): 162. Michael Dillon, “Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Bio-­political Emergence,” International Political Sociology 1.1 (2007): 7–28, 7. “Barack H. Obama—Nobel Lecture,” Nobelprize.org, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_ prizes/peace/laureates/2009/obama-­lecture_en.html (accessed February 18, 2011). Brad Evans, Liberal Terror: Global Security, Divine Power and Emergency Rule (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, forthcoming).

A G A I N S T the D A Y

Mark Duffield Total War as Environmental Terror: Linking Liberalism, Resilience, and the Bunker

Introduction

T

otal war is usually understood in terms of the dissolution of the juridical distinctions among governments, armies, and people. It is associated with the industrialization of warfare and the advent of mass social mobilization. Total war, however, is more than this. It is a modus operandi of violence that, in the broadest sense of the term, demands the destruction of an enemy’s environmental lifeworld.1 The targets of this war include the climate regimes, vital urban infrastructures, ecological systems, and social networks, together with the neurological and cellular processes that collectively support life and make it possible. Since the essence of such warfare is surprise and uncertainty, especially the dread of not knowing when or where the blow will fall, total war operates through terror. More specifically, it works as environmental terror. Emerging from a deepening science-­led dialogue between war, nature, and economy that began with World War I, environmental terror calls forth the attributes and skill sets of resilience. Resilience provides a defense against the unpredictability and uncertainty of environmental terror. Together with the ability to recover from surprise and shock, resilience denotes the capacity to forge new conditions of existence while still retaining system functionality.2 Rather than a direct confrontation and elimination of the causes of environmental terror, however, resilience is a defense that relies more on constant adaptation to surrounding uncertainty. Indeed, the ability to change and adapt becomes a virtue in itself. The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:3, Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-1275779 © 2011 Duke University Press

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For resilient systems and relationships, uncertainty is not necessarily negative. Because it has the potential to foster new and, by implication, more robust conditions of existence, unpredictability can be positive. For most of the twentieth century, however, modernity offered an essentially different approach to uncertainty, an approach that sought to limit its effects.3 The emergence of environmental terror is intrinsically linked to the neoliberal crusade against modernity that surfaced during the 1970s. Reaching its zenith in the mid-­twentieth century, political modernity was shaped by, among other things, social insurance and the welfare or New Deal state that, coupled with an ethos of comprehensiveness and standardization in urban and public planning, aimed to protect against the contingencies and pathologies of everyday life.4 Emerging from the class struggles and political compromises associated with industrial capitalism, modernity, unlike resilience, attempted to banish want and anxiety. For resilience, however, uncertainty is an essential antidote to the psychological and material dependency that welfarism and public planning are held to entrench. For liberalism, anxiety is necessary if the desirable attributes of foresight, enterprise, and self-­reliance are to flourish. Uncertainty, however, does not exist outside the military and political conditions of its creation. Regarding the wider economy, now located in neoliberal processes of privatization, deregulation, and globalization, environmental uncertainty is a fabrication. Having its origins in warfare, the bunker, in all its many forms and variable scales, provides a generic response to environmental terror. For example, when linked by secure corridors to form archipelagos of privileged circulation, bunkers provide a solution to the problem of maintaining good circulation in a fragmented and threatening lifeworld. Defended archipelagos bridge the buttressed development-­underdevelopment divide. At the same time, in a postpolitical age, the bunker furnishes a secure space of private consumption from which international elites can safely strategize power without the need for negotiation or compromise. Total War and the Problematization of Society World War I was instrumental in the emergence of environmental terror. It saw the first use of poison gas on the battlefield and the beginnings of the aerial bombardment of cities. The possibility of strategic bombing revealed society as having new spatial, logistical, and ecological dimensions. Enemy society was discovered to be an interconnected set of vital

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technical systems or critical infrastructure. Economy was redefined ecologically in terms of its strategic industries, electricity stations, sewage systems, and workers’ housing, interconnected by networks of railways, telephone systems, bridges, and canals.5 This spatial understanding demanded new forms of intelligence, not only to catalog critical infrastructure but also to note the habits and characteristics of the people that depended on it. Known as morale bombing, the destruction of critical infrastructure from the outset was imbued with mass effects. That is, by destroying the enemy’s environmental lifeworld, it was argued that the will to fight could be broken and popular insurrection and calls for appeasement could be encouraged. There is, however, an obvious reflexivity to morale bombing: it can work in both directions. The doctrine of interwar strategic bombing necessarily called forth a system of civil defense. Rather than protecting civilians, however, civil defense during the 1930s was essentially concerned with controlling the expected civil unrest and the wholesale abandonment of the towns and factories. If strategic bombing can be said to target the external enemy, civil defense is concerned with the enemy within. In the United Kingdom, the idea of civil defense is colored by the short-­lived modernist program of protection and insurance during World War II that included mass shelters, warden and rescue services, and the evacuation of children from exposed urban areas.6 Civil defense against nuclear attack during the Cold War, on the other hand, essentially reconnected with, and rejuvenated, its interwar iteration as defense against the internal enemy. There is another less well-­known strand in the genealogy of critical infrastructure. The radical interconnectedness of large-­scale urban technical systems concerned with energy, communications, transport, and essential commodities also became evident at the turn of the twentieth century with the appearance of the mass strike as a potential political weapon. By this time, the concentrated energy embodied in coal had encouraged urban agglomeration and the growing logistical integration of industry and commerce. Exploiting this coupled dependency, the contagious mass strike emerged as a political possibility. The coevolving fears of revolution and advances in warfare contain a premonition of the vulnerability of critical infrastructure or, more precisely, the vulnerability of the city. At its inception, the modern city, through the exposure of its vital technical systems, was laid bare to unpredictable and nonterritorial external and internal enemies. Environmental terror erases the distinction between the inside and the outside. Moving into the political foreground following the emerging critique of political modernity in the 1970s, this erasure, together with

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the breakdown of other established dichotomies and limits, would gather momentum with the ending of the Cold War. During the 1920s, for example, The Hague Commission on Air Warfare attempted to bring aerial bombardment within the rules of war. Liberal states, not wishing to renounce the new weapon, would agree to outlaw only the deliberate bombing of civilian targets.7 However, since total war required mass mobilization and a country’s entire industrial output was now required to support and equip that mobilization, everything from rope to jam acquired a military significance. At the moment of attempting to legislate against strategic bombing, the entire urban infrastructure was exposed as a legitimate target. War and economy blur on the terrain of critical infrastructure. Likewise, in the United States, during the 1950s, it was realized that preparing for and responding to a hurricane was not unlike preparing for a nuclear attack.8 The skill sets of the responders were similar, and one could learn from the other. Thus, everything within the frame of environmental terror has a potential dual use and latency; everything that touches or supports life can be turned around. Everything can be weaponized. Internalizing Environmental Terror In the emergence of environmental terror and its ability to blur war, nature, and economy, the decade of the 1970s is key. During this time, the liberal critique of modernity broke out on many fronts and, significantly, marked the beginning of contemporary environmentalism. Because of the uncertainties over location and severity, civil defense against nuclear attack had already pioneered technologies of imaginative enactment and scenario-­ based role-­playing. These technologies allow policy makers to bring an uncertain future into the present as an object of policy—if the future cannot be predicted, at least preparedness can be improved through gaming a scientifically informed scenario. Reflecting its dual-­use potential, by the 1970s imaginative enactment had begun to migrate into catastrophe insurance.9 Imaginative enactment and role-­play techniques to address uncertainty are by now well established within the business world, disaster management, and the security state. Another important expression of dual-­use potential and latency was the creation of a public all-­hazard disaster capacity within the leading liberal states. During the 1970s, government bodies previously concerned with nuclear civil defense began to redefine themselves as responding to

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disasters more generally, including floods, hurricanes, air-­traffic accidents, critical infrastructure failure, industrial accidents, civil unrest, and pandemics.10 The international humanitarian system also assumed its present shape and organization during this time. Some of the impetus for the transference of the disaster technologies pioneered in war to wider environmental emergencies came from civil activists. They were concerned that nuclear civil defense had abandoned any effective measures to actually protect people. They argued that if public money was to be spent on disaster and recovery, it was preferable to spend it on public all-­hazard preparedness. Although activists at the time saw themselves as civilianizing the technologies concerned, one can argue that the 1970s was a decisive moment in the militarization of the environment. In particular, the decade saw risk perception shift from external military threats to all-­encompassing environmental terror that threatened society’s vital systems. Imagining Resilience If, in public, the trend was to all-­hazard preparedness, then gaming how to survive nuclear attack not only continued but civil defense became increasingly secretive. From the 1950s to the 1980s, countless attack enactments took place.11 Many of these were large-­scale events that took months to plan and execute and frequently involved many government, scientific, and private sector participants, sometimes functioning internationally. Operating in private from hardened bunkers, starting in the 1960s civil defense quite literally went underground. In the UK, the problem of the enemy within was an important component of these enactments, especially how to control a postattack population that, effectively, was reduced to self-­reliance. The 1982 “square leg” scenario described in Duncan Campbell’s War Plan UK depicts in some detail a devastated landscape menaced by marauding gangs of desperate postattack survivors attempting to break into guarded food stores and the protected regional seats of government.12 Within this scenario, survivors were triaged by bunkered authorities according to their age, their health, and, significantly, their social usefulness measured against the technical and manpower requirements of the surviving critical infrastructure. This scenario evokes the feel of contemporary humanitarian operations in Africa. Rather than operating out of protected regional seats of government, international aid workers work in fortified aid compounds while making sovereign life-­and-­death decisions about otherwise aban-

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doned populations. Instead of a devastated landscape of marauding gangs, we have the total threat environment of poverty, violence, and enviro-­ economic maladaptation that underdevelopment is now held to represent. Whereas modern forms of public protection were destroyed in the imagined nuclear attack, in Africa they have been devastated for real by decades of neoliberal economic reform and looting by state incumbents and private companies. Besides offering a premonition of our direction of travel, the gaming of nuclear survival, especially the ability to fight on under radically changed circumstances, provides a glimpse of the practical origins of resilience. Gamed by teams of government, academic, and private-­sector officials and experts, continuity of government exercises were initially technically quite basic. They involved pens, paper, and slide rules and were limited in size by the number of referees able to calculate manually the probabilities concerned. As the 1950s progressed, the introduction of computers and systems theory enabled enactments to become progressively more complex. Computers created more demanding and multileveled models of economic logistics and generated time lapses and random events. Enactments could involve a wider range of players, and not least, computers allowed a greater feeling of realism. Government exercises explored the probability of surviving societal extinction and developed a lexicon of adaptability and improvisation within a framework of real-­time crisis management. Enactments gamed the ability to reconstitute a government around surviving critical infrastructure and, importantly, the probability of being able to fight on in such conditions. In all but name, they enacted resilience in terms of the ability to move between different socioeconomic configurations while still retaining system functionality. From Inclusion to Abandonment The discovery of resilience as a diagram of war provides a template for departures in ecology and economy also taking place in the 1960s and 1970s. In the work of Crawford S. Holling in ecology, for example, we see reflected in nature how contemporary society mobilizes for war.13 Through the medium of predator-­prey relations in the natural world, ecology refined the conceptual tools of complexity and resilience. In giving voice to these concepts, ecology naturalized war. This departure was part of the growing critique of modernist notions of equilibrium and steady-­state systems. In distinction, ecology pronounced it normal for natural systems to exist on the edge of extinction and to derive their dynamism from this condition.

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As its acolytes would argue, the same ideas could be applied to the social world. A resilient species is that which can avoid extinction through the ability to constantly adapt to uncertainty; life and lifelike cyborg systems were ordained as complex, emergent, and adaptive.14 As with war and nature, so with economy—the template of war also maps onto neoliberalism, especially the work of Friedrich van Hayek on self-­organizing markets.15 Through the Stockholm Resilience Centre, van Hayek’s work has been extended to the valorization of nature and the establishment of markets in ecological services, of which carbon trading is the best known. Not only do we see a diagram of war in nature, but nature itself has been rediscovered to function as a market. In the space of a decade, through this growing realization, resilience has established itself as a lingua franca of risk, preparedness, and survivability operating across the physical, natural, and social sciences. In particular, it has become the language of choice for disaster and risk management. Resilience is the official response to the environmental terror embedded in the radically interconnected and emergent lifeworld that liberalism has created. Both war among the people and dangerous climate change are expressions of environmental terror. They describe interconnected and self-­reinforcing threat terrains where nothing can be taken for granted and where everything has latency and dual use. They are expressions of an environment that, operating through uncertainty and surprise, has itself become terroristic. The emergence of environmental terror, with self-­ reliance as its ordained response, suggests that biopolitics has changed. Since the inception of liberalism, abandonment to life’s contingencies has been intrinsic to its approach to security through resilience. Arising from the class struggles and compromises associated with industrial capitalism, modernity aimed to temper that history. Providing you were not black, gay, or a woman, modernism operated an inclusionary logic. As part of the neoliberal project that has dismantled political modernity, resilience is indicative of a biopolitics that has once again realigned around processes of remedial abandonment. Only life that is exposed to environmental uncertainty can properly develop the desirable attributes of foresight, enterprise, and self-­reliance. Fabricating Uncertainty While environmental uncertainty appears natural, it does not exist outside the methods of its creation. Just like the comprehensive, standardized, and protective welfare technologies of modernism, uncertainty has to be

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politically realized. The privatization of critical infrastructure is indicative. Since the 1980s, urban critical infrastructure has been subject to widespread privatization, deregulation, and globalization. It was made possible by the prior deregulation of the financial markets and the move from a productive to a speculative economy. Compared to early postwar decades, when the key utilities were nationalized and governed by command and control management systems, together with standardized forms of pricing and investment in system redundancy, critical infrastructure has been fragmented.16 It is now governed through market-­based decision making and the normalization of just-­in-­time crisis management. In the United States and Europe, between 80 and 90 percent of critical urban infrastructure is privately owned. We know from control room ethnography and disasters like the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or the ash cloud following the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland in the same year that critical infrastructure now functions dynamically on the edge of collapse, at the limits of known system science, sociotechnical tolerances, and commercial liability. This fabrication of environmental terror, as it were, led Bill Clinton’s administration in 1998 to initiate the program of interventions, knowledge exchange, and cataloging that is known as Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). The Bunker The classic military response to environmental terror has been the bunker. With the generalization of environmental terror to form the basis of national and international security, as a strategic spatial form, the bunker has grown in societal prominence. Bunkers are defended spaces that can be hermetically sealed against a threatening and unknown environment. Contemporary bunkers exist in many forms and at variable scales. They can be physical as well as digital, often combining both as in offices or workplaces that are increasingly segregated through selective forms of keypad and card access mechanisms. Some bunkers have hardened boundaries, while other barriers are more symbolic or cultural. To list the most obvious, they range from gated communities through shopping malls and privately policed central business districts to tourist enclaves, military green zones, and the fortified compounds of the international aid industry. In a neoliberal world, where people are speculatively abandoned to a fabricated uncertainty, bunkers are necessary sites of refuge and strategization for the political, economic, and cultural elite. To serve this function, they

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exhibit varying degrees of self-­sufficiency, from private security to a full range of vital services. They are sites of private consumption and, importantly, defended spaces from which liberalism’s permanent emergency can be managed safely. Some argue, following Giorgio Agamben, that the nomos of the camp now defines urban space. However, others suggest we should see urban space primarily in relation to a nomos of circulation.17 The restriction of bad circulation has received significant attention, especially the enforced stasis and deepening surveillance of the global sans papiers abandoned to their own self-­reliance. This global lockdown is embodied in the rise of Fortress Europe (or America or Australia, for that matter). Such restrictions and exclusions, however, highlight the problem of maintaining good circulation in a fragmented, exclusionary, and threatening global environment. Nodal bunkers, linked by secure corridors and formed into defended archipelagos of privileged circulation, provide a regressive solution to this problem. We can trace the imprint of this spatial design in the blurring of total war into environmental terror. As noted, by the turn of the twentieth century, the urban concentration and interconnection of critical infrastructure had made the general strike a possibility. During the early 1920s, to counter the possible isolation of London and the breakdown of essential communications and supplies, the British government established a decentralized system of more than a dozen regional command centers. Armed with emergency powers, each of these centers had the ability to act independently to maintain continuity of government. As it happens, this system was never used, but it was taken over in the interwar years and adapted for the purpose of civil defense—defense against the internal enemy, that is.18 This network was progressively physically hardened during the Cold War, and the command bunkers, or regional seats of government, were connected by dedicated telecommunication links, discrete energy supplies, and priority roads. They represented a networked or nodular form of sovereign power. Bunkers were part of an archipelago of defended circulation that in the event of war could be secured against a population abandoned to self-­reliance, and from which continuity of government could be played out for real. With the collapse of the modern dialectic of class struggle and its associated politics of negotiation and compromise, power now operates as pure strategy.19 Bunkers are defended sites from which nonnegotiable power can be strategized in the face of induced uncertainty. The bunker, in its many

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different forms, is neoliberalism’s signature architecture for the postpolitical age. As a general principle, the privatization of critical infrastructure equates with the privatization of space and hence the proliferation of private security. Since the 1980s, one visible expression of a bunkered response to environmental terror has been the global spread of the gated community, which allows elites across the development-­underdevelopment divide to extricate themselves from the decaying public realm.20 During the 1960s and 1970s, urban planners approached the problem of insecurity through the concept of defendable space. In response to terrorism in Northern Ireland, the idea of rings of steel first entered the UK security lexicon in the 1970s. With razor wire and steel gates, Belfast’s central business district became a laboratory for security-­determined rezoning. This practice became more sophisticated during the 1990s with the protection of London’s key financial districts, this time incorporating more subtle barriers and advanced CCTV, including automatic number plate recognition technology for reading license plates. These security technologies have subsequently coevolved and migrated to the business districts and airports of other cities. Since 9/11, however, there have been important developments in policing the nomos of circulation including, for example, the appearance of the mobile or collapsible bunker.21 Complementing the fixed defensive structures of a fragmenting cityscape, temporary bunkers offer flexible continuity of government and business support services. In providing outreach to a threatening hinterland, they are especially useful in maintaining the spectacle of democracy at work. Supplying what is called island site security, they are associated with the policing of political party conferences, international business conventions, major sporting and cultural events, and visits by foreign dignitaries. Such security spectaculars involve a well-­rehearsed menu of road closures, flight exclusion zones, heavy policing presence, snipers, sewer and river inspections, mobile CCTV coverage, and Internet surveillance. These mobile rings of steel patch into the existing local resilience forums and thus the standing regional mechanisms for evacuation, decontamination, and major incident access. Similar to Cold War enactments, such continuity of democracy exercises are typically rehearsed beforehand. Global Civil War A major consequence of liberal interventionism, from the Balkans through Africa to Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond, has been to accelerate the frag-

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mentation of multicultural or otherwise open societies and the disappearance of urban conviviality. Postinterventionary societies have been demodernized and retraditionalized. To increase security, cities have been disaggregated into ethnic enclaves and defended international spaces that are physically defined by road closures, bypass highways, and various barriers. In supporting good circulation, bunkered archipelagos seamlessly connect desired spaces and times across the ramparts of the development-­ underdevelopment divide. While the fragmenting effect of elite gated communities on the urban environment in the global South is well known, in seeking to protect itself from the threat environment of underdevelopment, the aid industry’s demand for its own gated compounds and secure residential complexes is joining with and further accelerating this fragmentation.22 Together, national elite and aid industry requirements for secure space in postinterventionary cities are driving radical processes of social polarization, rezoning, and defended international circulation. Aid archipelagos, for example, interconnect fortified compounds in the global South with guarded agency headquarters in the privately monitored business districts of the global North. With the emergence of concierge-­style security consultants providing protection and rescue packages that cover risk avoidance, civil disturbance, kidnappings, and pandemics, the technologies of elite circulation are becoming increasingly comprehensive in terms of the protection they can provide. If, under conditions of environmental terror, bunkers and defended archipelagos are an integral part of the nomos of circulation, the resulting circuits of movement and elite refuge expose and mark out contrary spaces of exception; secure corridors delineate the global camps, as it were. Complementing the places of obvious confinement and rendition, today’s camps are more generalized and open-­ended, with porous and ambiguous borders. Camps denote the multiplying areas, zones, and social conditions in which rule is through administrative decree rather than by law. Camps range from marginalized social housing projects and airline passengers in transit to suspected disease carriers, potential terrorists, and the management of postindustrial international development programs. Such conditions and spaces are increasingly governed through combinations of administrative fiat, enforced self-­reliance, disaster management, and resilience. The fragmentation of urban space under the complementary logics of bunkers and camps marks out the spatial parameters of a deepening global civil war. Its bunkered architecture, however, is neither a celebration

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of victory nor a monument to a system that is confident of being able to achieve one. It is the spatial imprint of a former world system that, while fighting increasingly desperate rearguard actions on many fronts against terminal decline, is now under siege and being pushed back. To paraphrase Agamben, when a weak system is provoked or threatened, it easily becomes terroristic itself. Given that liberalism’s struggle for survival now extends from the cellular to the planetary, the stakes have never been higher. Moreover, from what we know, we can expect that this will be a fight to the death, a struggle to the final catastrophe. As many have already eloquently argued, the need to recover a political existence is more pressing than ever. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). Crawford Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973): 1–23. Pat O’Malley, “Governable Catastrophes: A Comment on Bougen,” Economy and Society 32.2 (2003): 275–79. Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). Philip S. Meilinger, “‘Morale Bombing’: The Evolution of Royal Air Force Doctrine Before World War II,” Journal of Military History 60.2 (1996): 243–70. Duncan Campbell, War Plan UK: The Truth about Civil Defence in Britain (London: Burnett Books, 1992). Paul K. Saint-­Amour, “Air War Prophecy and Interwar Modernism,” Comparative Literature Studies 42.2 (2005): 130–61. Arthur S. Flemming, “The Impact of Disasters on Readiness for War,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 309 (1957): 65–70. Stephen J. Collier, “Enacting Catastrophe: Preparedness, Insurance, Budgetary Rationalization,” Economy and Society 37.2 (2008): 224–50. Tracy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Ibid. Campbell, War Plan UK, 61–78. Crawford S. Holling, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4 (1973): 1–23. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009). See Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper, “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation,” Security Dialogue 14.2 (2011), forthcoming. Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism (London: Routledge, 2001); and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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Brad Evans and Michael Hardt, “Barbarians to Savages: Liberal War Inside and Out,” Theory and Event 13.3 (2010). Campbell, War Plan UK. Evans and Hardt, “Barbarians to Savages.” Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds., Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York: New Press, 2007). Jon Coaffee and David Murakami Wood, “Security Is Coming Home: Rethinking Scale and Constructing Resilience in the Global Urban Response to Terrorist Risk,” International Relations 20.4 (2006): 503–17. Mark Duffield, “Risk-­Management and the Fortified Aid Compound: Everyday Life in Post-­interventionary Society,” Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 4.4 (2010): 453–74.

A G A I N S T the D A Y

Julian Reid The Vulnerable Subject of Liberal War

​How we understand the nature of the subject that wages war has fun-

damental implications for how we understand the subject of the struggle against war. The subject of liberal war does not fight simply in order to destroy another subject but to produce subjects who will in turn reproduce the order for which such war is waged. Thus the problem of how to resist liberal war has to entail the question of how to resist the forms of subjectivity its wars produce. If we do not formulate the problem of subjectivity correctly, then the problem of resistance will be badly formulated as well. In an examination of the wars waged by the United States over the last decade, what kind of subject do we see being produced? In Frames of War, Judith Butler argues that the United States is a subject produced to conceive not only its own violence as righteous but its own destructibility as “unthinkable.”1 She writes: “The notion of the subject produced by the recent wars conducted by the US, including its torture operations, is one in which the US subject seeks to produce itself as impermeable, to define itself as protected permanently against incursion and as radically invulnerable to attack” (47). The U.S. desire for a condition of radical invulnerability is not a malaise that we can explain away simply on account of its military power, because it is, Butler argues, a symptom of the deeply embedded belief in security that has shaped modern discourses on subjectivity tout court. Exemplifying the biophilosophical tradition of thought that seeks to tear “the subject from the terrain of the cogito and consciousness” and “root it in life,”2 Butler’s ambition is to underscore the embodied nature of the subject and, more to the point, the living of the life that embodiment entails. The subject is a thing that lives, indeed, which must live, in order

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to be and, in living, is a thing that must die and therefore can never aspire to the kinds of security promised to it by the false prophets of Western metaphysics. Security, once considered in light of the subject’s finitude, must be dismissed as hyperbolic fantasy. Basic to the life of the subject is not its capacity to achieve security but its radical vulnerability. As Butler states, “There are no conditions that can fully ‘solve’ the problem of human precariousness. Bodies come into being and cease to be: as physically persistent organisms, they are subject to incursions and to illnesses that jeopardize the possibility of persisting at all. These are necessary features of bodies—they cannot ‘be’ thought without their finitude, and they depend on what is ‘outside themselves’ to be sustained—features that pertain to the phenomenological structure of bodily life” (29–30). Recognizing the vulnerability of the subject must mean, Butler argues, not just establishing a different way of theorizing subjectivity but establishing a different politics, one that emerges from the recognition of our vulnerability. Establishing such a politics of vulnerability is a task Butler ascribes to “the Left” because the pathological belief in security is as much a problem for the Left, she argues, as it is for the United States. Leftist movements concerned with protecting sexual minorities now oppose the expansion of rights of protection to immigrant minorities and give support to state violence against vulnerable populations on behalf of their causes. Such violence indicates the failure of the Left to have recognized the fundamentality of vulnerability to the subject (13). In light of this, Butler argues for the necessity of a “new bodily ontology” (2), underscoring vulnerability, for the development of a new form of leftist political subjectivity. The Left needs to understand vulnerability as “a shared condition” and to develop coalitions between different vulnerable subjects to struggle against the violence by which populations are differentially deprived of the basic resources needed to minimize their vulnerability (32). Butler’s plea for the extension of protection to vulnerable groups not recognized as such is appealing. As she states, “Part of the very problem of contemporary political life is that not everyone counts as a subject. . . . What is at stake are communities not quite recognized as such, subjects who are living, but not yet regarded as ‘lives’” (31–32). The determination of the differences between life deemed worthy of protection and life that can be destroyed is a problem of how we “apprehend a life” as such (2). That problem is doubly epistemological and ontological, being of “the frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured” as well as ontological “since the question at issue is: what is a

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life?” (1). And given that “the ‘being’ of life is itself constituted through selective means,” Butler is right that “as a result, we cannot refer to this ‘being’ outside of the operations of power, and so must we make more precise the specific mechanisms of power through which life is produced” (1). The name that Michel Foucault gives to the mechanisms of power and the selective means that produce life today is, of course, biopower.3 Indeed, if we want to understand how wars today are waged in destruction of life, it is helpful to understand them through the lens of his concept of biopolitics.4 As Butler argues, this requires questioning the discourses underwriting war today, most especially the claims concerning what counts as human life as such and what forms of life that are said to be dangerous to humanity. I agree with much of this, but there are some fundamental problems regarding the counterontological shift to vulnerability that Butler proposes for a leftist resistance to war today, which I wish to draw out here. Let us start with Butler’s claims concerning the ontological “fact” of vulnerability (23). One primary lesson that Foucault teaches us is the danger to be had in practicing philosophy by way of what he called “an imperative discourse.”5 Rather than engaging in a philosophy that glibly attempts to pronounce the facts or truth about life, it is necessary to analyze the “knowledge effects” produced by the imperative discourses that support the regimes of truth through which life is determined as life as well as to analyze how different forms of life are evaluated as worth living. Rather than pronouncing truths about life, Foucault examines the implications of what life is and what conditions will enable it. Every imperative discourse on life, no matter its content, entails such implications. This is why we must, if we are to do justice to Foucault, practice circumspection when examining claims about the reality or facts said to concern life. Imperative discourses are never grounded in facts, no matter how much they may make recourse to “the facts.” The “fact” of “vulnerability” is no different. It is an element within a discourse every bit as aesthetic as discourses that presuppose the possibility of security and on account of which Butler critiques their inauthenticity. This error owes to the debased ways in which Butler and others have engaged Foucault’s biopolitics. Life, as Foucault argues repeatedly, is not an ontological category. Rather than embracing Butler’s argument for the ontological fundamentality of vulnerability for the life of the subject, it befalls us to consider what the implications are for life when vulnerability is thus reified. What forms of life will a vulnerable subject discount as unworthy and indeed declare permissible to kill in order to defend the sanctity of its own account of life as vulnerable?

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This is not an abstract question. Whatever we may think about the veracity of Butler’s theory of vulnerability as predicate of life and precondition for subjectivity, it is necessary to note the degree to which this way of thinking about subjectivity is contemporaneous not with an incipient new leftism but with the dominant episteme and regime of power relations that the Left today has to combat. The ontology of the social underlying Butler’s account of vulnerability is deeply liberal. Vulnerability “implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all” (14). Such a problematization of the vulnerability of the subject on account of its exposure to an unknowable social domain of potential violence and harm partakes of a tradition of thinking that extends back to the foundations of liberalism in the seventeenth century, most significantly to the work of Thomas Hobbes. This tradition is the primary foundation on which the liberal state has legitimated itself from the origins of modernity. The subject’s vulnerability, based on exposure to an unknown and dangerous domain of relations, instantiates the very demand for protection on which liberal governance depends for its legitimation in relation to the subject. Late in his career, Foucault traced the development of the political rationality of liberalism within the European state form. In his 1978 lecture series at the Collège de France, he traced how that rationality grew in accordance with a problematization of the unknowability of the social.6 This unknowability provoked a will to know, which was incited by the state’s desire to secure the life of its subjects against the vulnerabilities entailed in social living—not simply, of course, on account of some benevolent interest in human well-­being but in order to render the state itself more stable and less vulnerable to the costs that arise from social insecurity. Thus, rather than following Butler and embracing another reiteration of liberalism’s understanding of the dangers posed to the subject’s vulnerable life by the unknowability of the social, we can better pose the questions of why, when, and how it was that the life of the subject came to be so conceived. We then find that we can locate Butler within the very tradition that the Left today is forced to think against. Within the liberal tradition, the trope of the vulnerable subject has undergone shifts and turns. Whereas in the seventeenth century the vulnerability of the subject was said to arise from its exposure to unknowable and dangerous social relations, by the eighteenth century that vulnerability was conceptualized as owing to its dependency on what was termed nature.

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In his 1979 lecture series, Foucault described how liberalism refabricated its understanding of the vulnerable subject in such terms. Writing in the eighteenth century, Nicolas de Condorcet, for example, developed the idea of a subject who is vulnerable because his interests are “dependent on an infinite number of things . . . on accidents of nature about which he can do nothing and which he cannot foresee . . . a course of the world that outstrips him and eludes him in every respect” such that “each [subject] is dependent on an uncontrollable, unspecified whole of the flow of things and the world.”7 Such claims as to the radical vulnerability of the subject to nature were, as Foucault reveals, central to the force with which liberalism was able to transform the model of European state sovereignty. They were the basis on which the liberal prohibition on governmental intervention within the economy arose and found its legitimacy. The claims that nature will always elude us and that if we attempt to control it we will “only ever see chimeras” are the fabricated truths on which the principal subject of liberal political economy, Homo economicus, proclaimed the impossibility of a sovereign point of view over the totality of the state.8 Homo economicus claimed: “You must not attempt to establish sovereignty over the accidents of nature, because you cannot achieve such a state, and you cannot because you are powerless in the face of it, and why are you powerless? Because you do not know how to establish such a sovereignty, and you do not know how to because you cannot know how to.” These were the “imperatives” and “facts” that Homo economicus wielded against the subject that believed it could achieve security by resolving its vulnerability to the accidental nature of the world, which it would have otherwise faced. Not only is this the curse that the subject of liberal economy throws at the sovereign that would seek to overcome its condition of vulnerability, it is the very kernel of the concept of economy itself. For what is economy when we examine it more closely than the name of the nature of the subject itself, Homo economicus? Commonly, of course, if we look at classical accounts of economy, we find it identified with forms of activity involving an “optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends.”9 In that sense, to be an economic subject is to be concerned with increasing life chances while having scarce resources. But as Foucault’s interrogation of the biopolitics of the liberal subject reveals, to be Homo economicus is not simply to be a subject interested in increasing the utility of its biomaterial resources but more fundamentally a subject in possession of a biomaterial nature. It is to be a subject that produces itself as a being that lives—indeed, that must live in order to be—and that in its finitude cannot aspire to achieve security

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but can only live out its vulnerability to the accidental nature of the world it inhabits. It is to be a subject that refuses the authority of powers that claim to act on its behalf and to secure life for it and to be a subject that proclaims its own superior capacity not to seek security from its vulnerability but to live in open relation with it, prospering from it through the renewed practice of an entrepreneurial resilience to its destructiveness. The history of the Left has, of course, been defined significantly by the struggle with precisely this “imperative discourse,” the subject that speaks it, and the account of the world it presumes. A central problem of the Left is how to speak back to this curse against the proposition of a power that affords protection from the contingencies of the world and offers some transcendence of such contingencies. How does Butler’s attempt to resituate the politics of the Left around the “apprehension of a common human vulnerability” figure within that history of struggle?10 Of course, Butler, unlike card-­carrying liberals, does not preach the value of the economic prosperity that arises from leaving the vulnerable to their own devices. Her project is to extend protection to populations otherwise deprived of it (31). But can that be achieved by claiming the illusion of security and the ontological fact of vulnerability? I don’t think so. If anything, Butler’s argument debases the leftist imaginary, such that its conception of subjectivity becomes indistinguishable from liberalism, making it difficult to resist liberal war. The future of the Left depends, I believe, on a reinvestment in the hubristic fantasy of a subject that can transcend its vulnerabilities, destroy their sources, and free itself from them. This subject does not just live in relations of subjection to the conditions on which it depends but seeks to escape its dependence. In contrast, Butler preaches the myth of a subject that cannot escape its milieu and can only ever depend on its environmental sources of life support. Indeed, the Butlerian subject is precisely one that lives its life terminally, and for political purposes comatosely, on “life support.” This is a mode of apprehending the life of the subject that assumes its incapacity—the subject’s life, as she says, is defined by its vulnerability to injury, loss, destruction, and neglect (31). In contrast, the Left today requires a subject capable of going to war with the very discourse of the reduction of life to biological dependence. This is the episteme and account of subjectivity on which contemporary power relations revolve. Rather than accepting vulnerability as an ontological aspect of subjectivity, we should grasp how the concept of vulnerability functions today within governing regimes’ strategies of subjectification. We are not simply vulnerable—we are called on to demonstrate ourselves as being vulner-

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able, individually and collectively. Even if we take a cursory look at a document as central to the discursive foundations of global liberal governance as the “United Nations Millennium Declaration,” we discover that “the vulnerable” are precisely the population on whose interpellation the major institution of that police order depends for its authority.11 Butler does not address this element of the discourse of vulnerability, and she fails even to treat the concept as discursive, instead asserting it as crude “fact.” How can vulnerability be a sufficient condition on which to base a politics of contestation to the “mechanisms of power” (1) through which human lives are framed today, when it is the first presupposition of liberalism, the tradition of thought and governance to which these mechanisms of power owe their origin? How can vulnerability be conceived as the foundation for a counterliberal theory of subjectivity, when it is the first presupposition of liberal biopolitics and its biologized subject? Captured as she is within the biopolitical limits of liberal discourse, Butler produces an account of a subject dependent on a milieu without which it cannot survive and whose powers of protection it must continually strive to maintain. Thus it is akin to the subject of psychoanalysis, defined by that which it lacks, immersed in objects with which it must maintain contact. Of course, dependency is an aspect of subjectivity, but it does not encompass the entirety of subjectivity nor merely the life or capacity for politics of the subject.12 In contrast, the task of a leftist theory of the subject today is to rediscover the subject’s other side, which entails the ways by which it decides what it wants, asserts what it possesses, and celebrates what it is able to do. I call this the hubristic dimension of the subject. Today we might observe that hubristic is the subject who acts against the monarchy of life, challenging the subject’s reduction to a status of dependency on things outside the self, sacrificing that on which he or she has hitherto depended, taking what he or she wants, and celebrating autonomy. For it is not, as Butler asserts, that we are by necessity dependent on any life support, but to be more than merely vulnerable subjects, we have to be able to free ourselves from such support. The problem of vulnerability is not ontological but epistemological, subjective not universal. Every account of subjectivity entails its own account of violence and cannot avoid riffing on the questions of who it is desirable to kill and how. Does the age-­old problem of political violence get any better if we invest in vulnerability rather than hubris as the foundation for political subjectivity? No. Vulnerability breeds its own violence, and Butler is not shy about endorsing forms of political and indeed state-­led violence, for example, in

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situations of imminently declared “genocide” to protect “the vulnerable” (37). But the weakness of stressing our shared vulnerability in order to resist the violence of the United States owes as much to Butler’s diagnosis of the nature of subjectivity being produced by those wars. On this problem, Butler follows a well-­trodden path of misperceiving U.S. foreign policy as an expression of an “arrogant politics” born out of its supposedly classical imperialist ambition. As she argues, the subject produced by these wars believes in the possibility of it becoming impermeable, permanently protected, and radically invulnerable (47). Is this true? When we examine the discourses underpinning the legitimation of the reassertion of the sovereign power of the United States to wage war since the declaration of its “war on terror,” what do we see? A sovereign subject convinced of its eventual indestructibility? Or a vulnerable subject preoccupied with its own weaknesses? A subject that conceives of itself deploying violence strategically with a view to achieving a “permanent” condition of security? Or one that no longer believes in the possibility of such security and is committed to a policy of an endless war? Of course it is the latter. We have to look only at the hysterical discourse within the United States around the “vulnerability” of the “national infrastructure.”13 In the United States, infrastructure is defined as the “various human, cyber, and physical components that must work effectively together to sustain . . . quality of life,” and the U.S. war on terror has become organized around the protection of the conditions for “quality of life.”14 A startling likeness is found between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s account of U.S. vulnerability to “terrorism” and Butler’s demand that we reconceive political obligation as the obligation “to the conditions that make life possible” because “there can be no sustained life without those sustaining conditions, and those conditions are both our political responsibility and the matter of our most vexed ethical decisions” (23). This discursive interface reveals the lie on which rests her representation of the subjectivity whose violence she contests. The primary vulnerable subject today is the United States, whose violence comes from its own biopoliticized self-­understanding as an entity whose survival and capacity to care for life globally is at stake in a war with an enemy dedicated to the destruction of life-­promoting conditions.15 So where can the Left go from here? Now that we have laid to rest the issue of the potential of Butler’s account of vulnerability for the theorization of future politics, it befalls us to reestablish the preconditions of a leftist account of subjectivity. The major task facing the Left today is that

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of reconceptualizing the subject so that it may free itself from hegemonic and stultifying accounts of its being that revolve around the fears of what can be done to its biological properties and capacities—the reduction, in other words, of political subjectivity to biopolitical subjectivity, and that of the human to the biohuman.16 Conceiving subjectivity as such is peculiar to the regimes of subjectification that the Left today is pressed to combat. A politics to supersede the conditions of liberal modernity requires a subject capable of thinking within an idiom of what Félix Guattari once named “incorporeal species.”17 Incorporeal species live but do not die. They can be forgotten or lost, cease to exist, but die as such they cannot. The political is one such species. The future of the political subject will not depend on his or her life as such but on the deeds and bonds of which the subject is capable, some of which will compromise his or her mere life and the very livability of his or her subjectivity. Political subjects do not merely depend on their milieus or desire the sustainability of the conditions for living the lives they do; rather, they resist those conditions and at times overcome them and transform them into what they were not, thereby establishing new conditions for life. Hubris is the constitutive power through which political subjects come into existence, amid the fantasy of the possibility of another life, another existence. This is not to deny the illusional quality of fantasy but to underline the claim that illusion is the fundamentally human capacity. Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7

Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2009), 47. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 221. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990). Julian Reid, “Politicizing Connectivity: Beyond the Biopolitics of Information Technology in International Relations,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22.4 (2009): 607–23; Julian Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); and Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London: Routledge, 2009). Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977– 1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 3. Ibid. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 277.

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8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17

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Ibid., 281–82. Ibid., 268. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), 204. “As leaders we have a duty therefore to all the world’s people, especially the most vulnerable and, in particular, the children of the world, to whom the future belongs.” United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 55/2, “United Nations Millennium Declaration,” September 8, 2000, www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm. Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, trans. Mario Wenning (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 13–19. Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War, 127–46. Department of Homeland Security, The National Plan for Research and Development in Support of Critical Infrastructure Protection, 2004, www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/dhs/ nat_plan_rnd_crit_infra.pdf (accessed February 28, 2011). Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror. Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War, 147–56. Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone, 2000), 43–44.

A G A I N S T the D A Y

Michael Dillon Specters of Biopolitics: Finitude, Eschaton, and Katechon

Security as a Generative Principle of Formation

​What if ?” a Unisys publication asked some years ago. “What if security “

wasn’t a cage? What if instead of keeping things out, it let amazing things in? What if it made you bolder, more ambitious and enabled you to accomplish more than you ever thought possible? What if security unleashed your full potential?” Elsewhere Unisys stated: “Security can no longer be viewed as a means to a defensive end. It has to become a catalyst for achievement. It must enable you to be more innovative, more competitive and more ambitious.”1 Security does not figure as a value or commodity here. It is equally clear from political as well as military strategic and security discourse that security has never figured as a mere value or commodity. It occurs throughout political, military, and security discourses, as it does here in these riffs from Unisys, as a generative principle of formation.2 In the modern age, especially, security is the constitutive principle of political statehood and selfhood. Through security discourses, the discourse of war is inscribed as the discourse of peace, where modern peace is the continuous attempt to establish secure (political) order internally as much as externally. In the process, security discourses specify the politics of peace in terms of the unfolding of burgeoning discourses of danger and spiraling security problematizations, threatening fields of formation, surfaces of friction, adversarial relations, irreconcilable enmities, and war in the name of life itself. But if war proceeds from modern security imperatives, from whence

The South Atlantic Quarterly 110:3, Summer 2011 DOI 10.1215/00382876-1275797 © 2011 Duke University Press

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does security derive its formative properties as a generative principle of formation? What is the differentia specifica of security politics as a generative principle of formation? Since politics of security have a history and the problematizations of danger against which they authorize war also come in different forms, what then is the differentia specifica of modern security politics? Pace traditional accounts of security discourse, the conditions in which it is possible to conceive of modern security politics differ from other times, other places, and other spaces. The Temporal Enframing of Security Taking place in time, circumscribed by the figuration of time in which their space of problematization, their positivities, and their empiricities unfold, politics of security and war are nonetheless always the politics of the limit. “Doomed to time,”3 the very space of possibility for modern security politics of the limit therefore emerges from its temporal enframing, specifically the Copernican turn away from the transcendental finitude of a divinely ordained universe to the factical finitude of modern times. The limit to which modern security politics of the limit therefore addresses itself, and from which it derives its securitizing and war-­making warrant, is that of the eschaton of time conceived as factical finitude. Circumscribed within the horizon of factical finitude, the eschaton made immanent, the limit politics of modern security assumes a distinctive quality. The Unisys advertisements illustrate this beautifully, turning our attention to the modern eschaton as an open horizon of temporal possibility within which the infinite becomings of finite things, happenings, or events—the ontico-­ontological difference of the event of the Event being a primary motif of modern security politics as much as it is of Continental thought—are continuously enjoined to take place.4 Since everything modern takes place in the factical account of finitudinal time, history, there is no modern time other than that of the changing facticity of finitudinal time. The modern eschaton, accurately depicted here by Unisys, does not signify the biblical threshold of the end of time. To repeat, the temporal limit of modern times signifies, instead, a continuously open horizon of finite possibility, an infinity of finite possibilities. This prompts me to pose a general thesis about politics of security and war that I wish to take up in relation especially to our modern biopolitics of security and its martial pursuit of life. That thesis is as follows.

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Security as Political Eschatology Every politics of security, by virtue of the very fact it is a politics of the limit, is also constituted by what we might call a political eschatology, is itself a form of political eschatology. As a generative principle of political formation derived from addressing the institution and regulation of a temporal political order from the perspective of the terminal dissolution of that order, a politics of security derives its warrant to secure and to wage war “eschatologically.” As a political eschatology, the rule of truth spoken by modern politics of security is concerned with the end of things, while the truth of rule that it institutes, and for which it kills, derives from the positive exigencies of government and rule that arise in restricting that end. For it is from the catastrophic threat of the dissolution of the order of things that the politics of security not only derives its very warrant to secure and liberal war its warrant to kill. The catastrophic threat-­event of the dissolution of the temporal order of things is continuously also interrogated to supply the governing technologies, by which the political order is regulated in peace to be “fit” for war and is regulated so as to resist the same catastrophic threat-­event. The security politics of the limit continuously unfolds the positivities and empiricities, orders of identity and belonging, markers of certainty norms, behavioral patterns of conduct, and globally organized logistics of mass killing as well as associated apologias, rhetorics, and ideologies that are indexed to the limit and warranted by it. Essential to the rule of any truth, marking the limit conditions within which it is possible to conceive and practice a rule of truth, the changing configuration of the Occidental account of the eschaton fed directly into the development of the modern thought of the rule of truth, from Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and Marx to Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger just as it fed into the truth of rule. Jacob Taubes’s extraordinary account of the changing course and character of Occidental eschatology, from biblical through to modern times, also reminds us forcefully that eschatology has a history.5 From Taubes we can also appreciate the degree to which the changing history of the Christian eschaton in particular was central to the career of the onto-­theologico-­political problematic of the West.6 A continuous source of theological dispute, Occidental eschatology prompted violent challenges to the institution of the religious and political order of things throughout the Christian era. The eschaton remains a source of civil as well as religious strife today,

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always a theologico-­political field of sacralizing formation, though one that functions differently now because the modern finitudinal immanentization of the eschaton, as an open horizon of possibility rather than the threshold to everlasting life, transforms the nature of the eschaton and the mode of (political) being instituted by it. Modern time, in short, is no less eschatological than Christian time. But it is different, and the difference accounts for the aporetic mode of being of the modern factically finitudinal order of things, and its sacralizing quality, not least that of the cultic security politics of the limit of modern political orders and the war that such politics wages in the holy name of the life of the modern finitudinal eschaton. An eschaton is nonetheless also a question continuously in question. What is the nature of the eschaton? How is it known? How is it made known? Who is to know it and preside over its mysteries? For what mode of enquiry does it call? How is life to be lived in the light of the eschaton and in that of the future it foretells? What mode of being, in other words, is enjoined by the eschaton? What, in time, according to some posited order of time, does the eschaton foreshadow? What forms of government and rule does the specter of the eschatological rule that hauntingly comprises eschatological truth—the exigencies of government and rule viewed from the standpoint of the material end of the temporal order of things—make terminally urgent as well as possible? What rule of truth, and what truth of rule, obtains under different eschatological regimes? Who gets what, where, when, and how under the strategic calculus of eschatologically necessary killing, especially when it is waged in the name of life through the finitudinal biopolitics of security and war? For biopolitics of security is also a regime speaking truth about the nature of times through the truth of the end of times, and the mode of being required to live in, live out, and live up to the eschatological security imperative to resist, at whatever self-­ sacrificial cost, the end of the temporal order of things. Keeping the eschaton out of the question demands relentless political and ideological work. But it remains and so persists as a continuous focus also of sedition and contention within any rule of truth. Since the eschaton is not only the locus of fundamental challenges to the conditions on the basis of which a particular rule of truth is conceivable, calling those conditions into question and offering, for example, rival accounts of the eschaton also subvert the very truth of rule of a rule of truth. That is how it “is.” That is the real, eschatologically, and it empowers liberal security discourses and war biopolitically; the analytic of which, positively, in the Fou-

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cauldian sense, furnishes its governmental technologies and military strategic operational concepts and doctrines, as well as its political rationalities. Rule of truth and truth of rule—if the truth teller is telling the truth, then the truth is for everyone, and if what the truth teller says is true, then it follows that the conduct of conduct, from the individual to the collective, should be aligned or align itself with the truth. Thus, truth and rule directly imply one another here as they have always done throughout the intimate strategic relationship of the onto-­theological and the political. Such is the case, too, for the rule of truth and truth of rule of the eschaton. Excavating the eschaton of a rule of truth and truth of rule calls into question the very mode of being warranted by that eschaton. There is no more seditious an act. There nonetheless seem to be two set responses to the calling into question of an eschaton, on the basis of which it is possible to conceive and enact a temporal order of things. The first response is to side with the forces of order, accepting their warrant to rule in the name of preventing the dissolution of the prevailing temporal order of things. The second is to side with the order of the repressed subjected to the rule of truth and the truth of rule of any such temporal order. The first response is katechontic. It conceives its task as that of restraining the coming of the end of the temporal order of things. The second response is messianic. It conceives its task as keeping open the call to justice that arises within the temporal order of things and the possibility of another order.7 The two appear to be in continuous war with one another, for they seem to offer different interpretations of and dispositions toward the very condition on the basis of which a rule of truth and a truth of rule unfold in their positivities and empiricities as well as in their articles of faith—whether or not that faith is in Christ, or whether it is the modern faith in what Alain Badiou calls fidelity to the event, or in Jacques Derrida’s “the politics to come.”8 Within the tradition of Occidental eschatology, they nonetheless represent quite discrete stages in the sacred narrativizing of revealed religion’s transcendentally governed and soteriologically indebted finitudinal politics of security. In the biopolitics of security and war waged in the name of life they are conflated. The katechontic becomes a form of messianic mission. Eschatology, by which I mean the configuration of and rule according to the end of a temporal order of things and not merely the Christian account of the eschaton, is central to the archeological structure and genealogical emergence of Western philosophy and politics (rule of truth and

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truth of rule). In the form of a factical finitude’s open horizon of possibility, it is central also to the posing of the political problematic of modern times. As Michel Foucault puts it in The Order of Things, the epistemological problematic of the modern—its very analytic of finitude—is not only posed in terms of reference solely to factical finitude but is thereby tasked with giving concrete epistemological form to factical finitude.9 Analyzed epistemologically by Foucault, the point is equally applicable politically. It is applicable also to the military-­strategic operational concepts and doctrines and the civil-­military apparatuses of security, so deeply sutured into the everyday politics of contemporary liberal regimes. Modern politics, too, emerged as a project defined by the way it posed the problematic of rule in—and by reference solely to—factical finitude. The task of modern rule also became that of giving concrete political form to finitude. Thus the death of God, politically, remains a violent project, not an accomplishment. Neither is it a done theological or philosophical deal; the doctrinal disputes of the medieval church along with those of the Reformation were as implicated in the dying-­off of the Christian God as the facticity (or so-­called secularization) of modern rule and truth telling. It thus had its precursors in the scholastic revolutions of the twelfth century, as much as in Machiavelli and above all Hobbes.10 When Foucault refers to the way in which there was a transformation of political reasoning from the sixteenth century on, he failed to give adequate attention to the way in which there was a corresponding transformation of theological reasoning. Just as the transformation of political reasoning often found its expression through the tropes of theological discourse, so the transformation of theological reasoning often found its expression through newly addressing questions of temporal conduct and rule. Each was concerned with securing regulation of the conduct of conduct and the establishment of reliable forms of rule in violently changing circumstances. They often also had a lot to say directly to one another. Each remained a point of reference for the other, in the realm of reasoning as well as in the realm of practice. They diverged but did not entirely separate, and they never have. Secularization theses flatten the violent differences that persisted within the medieval church just as much as they exaggerate the extent to which the modern problematization of politics and rule has been secularized. The theologico-­political problematic of rule persisted after the dissolution of both empire and church. It persisted into the modern period, though under significantly different formulations. The Copernican turn from transcendental to factical finitude thus has

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a history. That history is less of secularization than resacralization, a radical reformation of the sacred as a field of theo-­logico-­political formation. Foucault’s “analytic of finitude”—factical finitude as opposed to the soteriological finitude of the Christian era classically expressed in Augustine’s saeculum11 and indexed to the promise of the soteriological security of eternal salvation and everlasting peace—refers therefore to how the eschaton of modern factical finitude is interrogated, as a condition both of possibility and operability, to furnish the modern order of things, political, as well as epistemological and also theological.12 One curious thing about the political orders of modern finitude is their recognition that they, too, must be finite since there is no modern time but the finitudinal time within which all finite forms, including those of politically finite regimes, are fated to come and go. The fate of Carthage haunts every Caesar. Scipio’s dream is a dream more than one military commander has had. Persistence in and through the facticity of finitudinal time is the challenge. But the only guarantee offered by the facticity of finitudinal time is that finite forms—however emergent, adaptive, and resilient, according to modern liberal security jargon—are fated ultimately to go. What is especially curious is how much the security politics of modern times are midwife to such comings and goings; it is especially curious and paradoxical, so it seems, although the paradox is so pervasive it has to be counted as a primary characteristic of modern security politics. They do not merely threaten—they positively bring about the end to the temporal orders they claim to secure. There has been no modern state, and there remains no modern political order of any kind, whose security politics have not, in every quotidian way, transformed that state or political order out of all recognition, when, through war, they have not actually brought about its cataclysmic end in the name of restraining that end. Making its appearance in the form of the emancipation of a more factical realism, modern finitude is nonetheless a hard taskmaster, equally as hard as, if different from, the biblical god, for just as “something like a will or a force was to arise in the modern experience,” it appears no more imperious and relentless than when posed as the requirement to give concrete form to finitude.13 Accounts of finitudinal time now recognize no terminus, no final end, and no law that gives the law to the engendering of the finite forms that come and go through the pervasive and intensive procreational relations of force, of which finitudinal time is widely seen to be comprised. Construed as an open-­ended adventure in the intensive procreative

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Specters of Biopolitics 787

engendering of finite form, forms are fated to end and are also fated to be subject to intensive relations of (in)finite procreative force since they are not given in nature but describe continuous processes and patterns of emergence and dissolution operative throughout these the forces of nature. As Walter Benjamin observed of modern capitalism, there is no day of rest for the factically finite, the securitization of capital remaining its most potent cultic as well as material and positive expression.14 Needless to say, such a nature is transformed beyond recognition from that of the natural philosophers of the Christian and early modern periods. The nature of the nature of factically finite life, in particular, is no longer even the symphony of the early twentieth century but a cacophony of intensive relations of protean force.15 Doomed to time, the finitudinal political analytic of modern power relations are nonetheless also diverse and heterogeneous. There is no single response to the challenges set for the political analytic of finitude. As it were, there is no single political modernity. Modern politics of security are therefore also diverse and heterogeneous. If there is more than one security politics and war of the limit, it follows that there is more than one modern idiom of political eschatology. The modern regime of power that now interests me most is that of biopower. Biopolitics also emerged as a response to the problematic of rule posed in and by the properties of finitudinal time and the demand thereby to give concrete political form to modern finitude. The regime of security and war that now interests me most is therefore that also of biopolitics of security and war. Biopolitics has not only risen to become arguably the dominant liberal finitudinal mode of rule, but it is in the rise of life as the organizing figure of liberal biopolitics that one can also see the impact of the immanentization of the eschaton most clearly. Here it is possible also to pursue the reverberations of that immanentization throughout the theologico-­ political field of the formation of contemporary global liberal governance, its cult of life security, and its ecumene of belief in the vitalist mystery of the emergency of emergence posed by the intensive relations of procreative force to which the biopolitics of security and war of modern finitude now newly address themselves. This occurs because the finitudinal life of biopolitics has undergone continuous and dramatic transformation throughout the modern period. Most dramatically, what it means to be a living thing has been reconstrued through the development of the life sciences of the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries and the accompanying molecular and digital revolutions. By life sciences, I mean not only the biological

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sciences but other related sciences of life. The life sciences have also had a direct material impact on the military strategic and security discourses of liberal peace and war at the turn of the twenty-­first century.16 The political eschatology I want to broach here is that of the twenty-­ first-­century biopolitics of security, one that continues to revolve, as Foucault first taught, around the finitudinal properties of life as species existence. Such a life is circumscribed by the open horizon of finitudinal time, factically understood through the work of the life sciences (those which also exceed the French life sciences Foucault drew on when he first described the emergence of biopower and biopolitics17), and regulated from the perspective of the exigencies of keeping that temporal eschaton at work in the political regulation of life, whose mission is to secure life to make life live. As Foucault taught, when one says, “biopolitics,” one says, “biopolitics of security.”18 Since you cannot secure anything without first specifying what you wish to secure, the biopolitics of security does not simply posit what life is, as if it were already known what it is to be a living thing. Biopolitics, too, must positively specify what the life to be secured consists in, from whence the threats to that life arise, and ultimately what calculus of necessary killing must prevail to preserve life in its vital intensive relations of procreative force against the agents and forces, themselves always in fact arising also within life. This is what makes life the enemy of life in biopolitics, that threatens life in its positive procreativity. Thereby arises one of my quarrels with biopolitics. To secure life biopolitically now demands an eschatological war for finitudinal time itself, prepared to sacrifice finitudinal time in the name of the relations of intensive procreative force of which finitudinal time is said to consist. Irrespective of its attachment to the natural rights discourse of early modern politics, liberal politics has become biopolitics simply because its fictive discourse of natural rights, as a throwback to the pre-­Copernican providential world of the scholastics, was insufficient to give political and governmental form to the problematization of rule progressively posed by the Copernican turn to factical finitude. The Biopolitical Order of an Immanentized Eschaton I want to focus, therefore, on this point: where there is an eschaton, there is a katechon. Where there is a threat to the end of temporal order, there is the impetus to resist, restrain, or otherwise defer that end. I also wish to pur-

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Specters of Biopolitics 789

sue that point in relation to the biopolitics of life itself, where the eschaton concerns the open finitudinal horizon of the modern account of life, and the katechon concerns the preservation of that horizon, thereby biopolitically policing what it is to be alive and what it means to have a life. I also wish to reflect on how, in the immanentization of the eschaton effected through the now prevailing biopolitical figure of life, the katechontic and the messianic not only become conflated in the imperializing of a biopolitical order of katechontic securitization, but a messianism attends that project and a new order of sovereign mystery also arises within it. Here we have to turn from the insight furnished by Unisys, which started the essay, to that offered by former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld with which I want to bring the essay to a provisional end. Recall Rumsfeld’s notorious but nonetheless revealing response to press enquiries about the absence of evidence of links between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and terrorist organizations: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”19 Herein the mystery of the biopolitics of security is exposed. It lies in the “unknown unknowns” of the radically contingent relations of procreative force that biopolitical eschatology says now constitutes political reality. The operational concepts and doctrines of its military strategic and security discourses are inspired by this conception of the protean character of biological nature. According to the logic of sovereign power, though, the sovereign cannot be of the order over which the sovereign presides. A paradoxical mystery prevails at the center of any sovereign order of power relations. In a biopolitical revision of Foucault’s account of power, factical finitude is now widely interpreted among Western liberal military strategic and security discourses of peace and war as comprising radically contingent intensive relations of procreative force.20 To exercise sovereign command of these radically contingent intensive relations of procreative force, the sovereign order of biopolitics cannot be of the order of these forces. The omnipresent, omnisurveillant, omniscient omnipotence that biopoliticized security discourses of peace and war locally and globally seek to exercise over intensive biopolitical relations of procreative force cannot hold sway over and through them, if it is itself subject to, or subject of, these very biopolitical force relations. It must somehow contrive to appear to stand outside or above them. The little-­reported conclusion to Rumsfeld’s riff made the

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point. Challenged by a reporter to say whether “this” was an “unknown unknown,” Rumsfeld exempted himself from the biopolitical order: “I am not going to say which it is.” Conclusion Thus, if Hobbes’s state of nature is a political eschatology, it is Carl Schmitt who establishes the political salience of the correlation of the eschaton and katechon and makes an explicit case for it in his theologico-­political theorization of sovereignty.21 The sovereign for Schmitt, steeped in an Augustinian account of the theologico-­political problematic of the Christian church, is the katechon that resists the end of the temporal order of things, and is, in Christian eschatology, also necessary to bring about the overcoming of the Antichrist, the end of finite time, and the rapture of the Second Coming. Hobbes framed his political eschatology in terms of and for a commonwealth during a period of catastrophic civil war. Schmitt framed his in terms of and for a people in the aftermath of the catastrophes of world war and economic disintegration. In a sense, both lived in and wrote for eschatologically heightened times. Our times are different but no less eschatologically intense. The biopoliticization of military strategic and security politics of the limit instituted especially by George W. Bush and Tony Blair remains nonetheless deeply imprinted messianically by an eschatological, katechontic mission because it has not merely been the outcome of mere national administration politics, however much it finds expression there. We must therefore always ask biopolitically: what happens when the end of the temporal order of things is enframed in terms of and for the now pervasive figure of life, rather than those other modes of political being formulated in response to the requirement to give concrete political form to finitude—commonwealth or people, but also man, state, and war?22 Prompted by that question, this essay brings forth the eschatological idiom of the contemporary biopolitics of security and war for consideration. Its proposition is that our contemporary biopolitics of security and war, indexed neither to commonwealth, people, man, nor state but to life, substantially exceeds the security politics of the limit of the national security state, which is also radically transformed by industrialization, massification, urbanization, nuclearization, and globalization of the last 150 years. In charging itself with resisting the end of the modern temporal ordering of life, the contemporary biopolitics of security and war have been driven

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Specters of Biopolitics 791

beyond the national security state and its geostrategic configuration of security and war into an empire of katechontic security. This, among other factors, accounts for the hyperbole so characteristic now of the biopolitics of security and war of the twenty-­first century. Equally, the war that biopolitical security institutes as its peace is a distinctive form of war. Taking place in life for life, targeting the autoimmune responses of life, it is an eschatologically driven “time war,” war in time on time, the time of life, to determine the configuration of the open horizon of factical finitude as such; it remorselessly seeks to secure warranted modes of finitudinal being that is enfranchised as alive and “a life” according to its capacity for suffering (resiliently surviving) the continuous emergency of a finitudinal emergence relentlessly regulated from the eschatological perspective of the biopolitical construal of the end of modern finitudinal times. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

Unisys, advertisements, Fast Forward (2007): 9, 8, www9.unisys.com/eprise/main/ admin/micro/doc/ff_2007q1.pdf (accessed February 28, 2011). Michael Dillon, Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (London: Routledge, 1996). Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989), 220. Michael Dillon, “Eventalness: The Politics of Truth and the Analytics of Finitude” (unpublished manuscript, 2010). Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-­Political?” in Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 213–55. Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher, eds., The Politics to Come: Power, Modernity and the Messianic (London: Continuum, 2010); and Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher, The Messianic Now: Religion, Philosophy, Culture (London: Routledge, 2010). Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005); and Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994). Foucault, The Order of Things, esp. “Man and His Doubles.” Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in Eng­land, 1640– 1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Paul Fletcher, Disciplining the Divine: Toward an (Im)political Theology (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009).

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15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22

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Foucault, The Order of Things, 209. Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Walter Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 288–91. Jacob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology, trans. Doris L. Mackinnon (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927). Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London: Routledge, 2009). Brett Buchanan, Onto-­Ethologies: The Animal Environment of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-­ Ponty and Deleuze (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008). Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977– 1978, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2008). “Donald Rumsfeld Unknown Unknowns!” YouTube video, 0:35, August 7, 2009, posted by BezanDarro, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiPe1OiKQuk (accessed February 25, 2011); emphasis added. Dillon and Reid, The Liberal Way of War. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007); and Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology (Cambridge: Polity, 2008). Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

Notes on Contributors Caetlin Benson-­Allott is an assistant professor of Eng­lish at Georgetown University, where she teaches film history, media theory, and gender and sexuality studies. Her Film Quarterly column, “Platforming,” addresses intersections of new media practice and spectatorship, and she is currently completing a manuscript on how home video distribution affects our experiences of and investments in feature-­length motion pictures. Steven Bruhm is Robert and Ruth Lumsden Professor of Eng­lish at the University of Western Ontario. The author of Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994) and Reflecting Narcissus: A Queer Aesthetic (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), he has also published widely on the contemporary queer gothic. He is coeditor of Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (University of Minnesota Press, 2004) and divides his time between a project on queer dances of death and a consideration of the “counterfeit child.” He owns a cell phone but always forgets to turn it on. Michael Dillon is emeritus professor of politics at Lancaster University. His recent work includes The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (Routledge, 2009), coauthored with Julian Reid, and Foucault on Politics, Security and War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), coedited with Andrew W. Neal. He is currently completing Biopolitics of Security in the Twenty-­first Century: A Political Analytic of Finitude and Deconstructing International Politics, both for Routledge. Dillon is also coeditor of the Journal for Cultural Research. Mark Duffield is a professor of development politics at the University of Bristol and director of the Global Insecurities Centre. He has taught at universities in Sudan and the United Kingdom. Duffield is currently a member of the Scientific Board of the Flemish Peace Institute, Brussels, and a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute, London and Nairobi. Outside of academia, during the 1980s, he was Oxfam’s country representative in Sudan. Duffield has advised government departments and nongovernmental organizations. His books include Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (Zed Books, 2001) and Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Polity, 2007). Brad Evans is a lecturer in political violence at the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on the (dis)connections between liberal forms of governance, the biopolitics

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of security, war, and violence, and the ethics of political difference. Some of his current projects include Liberal Terror: Global Security, Divine Power and Emergency Rule (Routledge, 2011), a coedited volume (with Julian Reid) Deleuze and Fascism: Securitisation, War and Aesthetics (Routledge, 2011), and a Web-­based project that explores the history of violence in Western political and philosophical thought (www.historiesofviolence.com). Ellis Hanson is a professor of Eng­lish at Cornell University. Kevin Ohi teaches Eng­lish at Boston College. Currently finishing a book on queer literary transmission, he is the author of Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Henry James and the Queerness of Style (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Julian Reid is a professor of international relations at the University of Lapland, Finland. He taught previously at King’s College London, Sussex University, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, at the University of London. He is the author of numerous studies of the liberal biopolitics of war, including The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (coauthored with Michael Dillon) (Routledge, 2009) and The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Manchester University Press, 2006). Matthew Tinkcom is associate dean in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Qatar and an associate professor in the Communication, Culture, and Technology Master of Arts Program at Georgetown University. He is the author of Working like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Duke University Press, 2002) and the coeditor of Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies (Routledge, 2001). Michele White is an associate professor of Internet and new media studies in the Department of Communication at Tulane University. Her recent work includes The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship (MIT Press, 2006), Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay (Duke University Press, forthcoming), “Listing eBay Masculinity: Erotic Exchanges and Regulation in ‘Gay’ and ‘Gay Interest’ Underwear and Swimwear Auctions” (in Journal of Gender Studies, 2010), and “What a Mess: eBay’s Narratives about Personalization, Heterosexuality, and Disordered Homes” (in Journal of Consumer Culture, 2010).

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