I watched Hilary Brougher’s The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997) the other day, an independent SF time-travel film that comments on gender, sexuality and racialised issues – and is also fun to watch. There is a good review out there, ‘Ofelia’s Kiss: Racing the Sticky Fingers of Time’, though my interest was on time understood as potential – and how intersting that the film finds this potential in the past. I’m now revising all the cool theory passing through in my thesis (and eating unbelievably huge amounts of brownies and chocolate whilst doing that, there must be some correlation between levels of libido and theory – meanwhile the cat, unaccustomed with having me in the flat for such long hours during the day, is going totally berzerk: now she’s lurking inside a black plastic bag holding a catnip banana and ready to attack my new thesis NEON tabs, £1.99 for 300, thank you very much), but will write about Sticky fingers of time at some other point.

Title Affective intensities at the skin of the social body: digital networks and the political potential of porn

Abstract

Increasingly porn opens up to new audiences and spaces, like academic and artistic settings, and in this process remediates earlier forms of cinematic experience. This paper focuses on how re-conceptualisations of porn in conditions of digital networks relate to forms of political engagement. It suggests that the political potential of contemporary porn-related circulation is not to be found in its “shock value”, or representation, but largely in its invitation to certain ways of public viewing, sharing of emotions and making meaning collectively. The paper reflects on a focus-group screening of the science fiction/porn film I.K.U. (Cheang, 2001), and from this starting point, it attempts a broader theoretical discussion about the political potential of contemporary porn-related events and networked media forms. I draw on Brian Massumi’s (2000) concept of “intensity” to frame transient publics forming around such events as “affective intensities”, or as collective bodies and affective modes of political engagement that materialise in response to the address of dominant digital culture.

Keywords: Affective intensity, IKU, digital culture.

communicative capitalism (Jodi Dean) : Dean’s concept of communicative capitalism draws from postpolitics (esp. Zizek) and post-representation to describe how in contemporary neoliberal societies the abundance of communicative messages makes it difficult for any meaningful political articulation to be heard.

‘The concept of communicative capitalism tries to capture this strange merging of democracy and capitalism. It does so by highlighting the way networked communications bring the two together. Communicative capitalism designates that form of late capitalism in which values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies’ (See Communicative capitalism and democratic deficit)

subultern counterpublics (Nancy Fraser): Nancy Fraser in her critique of the Habermasian liberal public sphere suggests that the assumptions in the ideal pub sphere model are instrumental for a masculinist burgeois order. She argues that multiplicity of publics does not signify fragmentation, and thinks of subultern counterpublics forming in marginalised discursive arenas of sociopolitical life, circulating counter discourses and forming oppositional identities(see here for instance).

referential metaculture (Berlant & Warner): Berlant and Warner suggest that because there are no primary signifiers for queer cultures, they produce their own with reference to non-standard intimacies (see Sex in Public).

homo oeconomicus (Michel Foucault): Foucault in his framing of biopolitics in Society must be defended initially and then in The Birth of Biopolitics, traces the changes from liberalism to neoliberalism. Homo oeconomicus is the individual who can respond, adapt to the systematic changes of the neoliberal environment of the enterprise society and thus becomes an enterpreneur (and the perfect governable subject). I examine the concept of biopolitics in my chapter about egg donation and feminist politics, but also in my chapter about porn bloggers and diffused forms of control in digital networks (see this article in Theory, Culture & Society and also Lazzarato).

intensity (Brian Massumi): Intensity for Massumi in Parables for the virtual  – as I understand it – refers to a state of tendency, emergence and duration between potential (affective) states and actual, structured, subjective emotions. Affect and emotion are not equated – affective intensity is the site of the unexpected, the happening and in this sense the body is framed as an event. Massumi draws from Spinoza, Deleuze, Bergson and others in his discussion – and I came to read Massumi through Tiziana Terranova (in her discussion about the gap between perception and image, and the political potential of this gap). In my thesis, affective intensity is useful in thinking about different modes of connecting, embodied politics that are not of the order of the narratological and the linguistic (they are of course within this order).

- the HFEA consultation on egg donation & compensation. According to the October 2011 press release, the HFEA decided to pay women £750 per cycle of donation, which according to Lisa Jardine reflects the ‘value of donation’ – not sure what this means. But I think I understand what ‘capitalise’ means in this sentence: ‘That’s why we have decided to capitalise on our unique position by actively helping the sector to attract and retain donors, use their donations to their full and ensure that donors are well cared for and valued.’ One of my thesis chapters examines some feminist biopolitical assemblages around the 2011 HFEA consultation and reproductive rights more generally in relation to debates about the global flows of information and bodily material.

I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to attend a viva prep workshop at Uni, since I was teaching on the day, but hopefully a meeting with my supervisors closer to the date (the big 31st) – and many meetings with my real and imaginary friends, where they ask me possible, impossible and obvious-so-never-bothered-to-answer questions, will help. I also attended the MeCCSA conference on Thursday last week where I talked about my research – a timely rehearsal but not particularly close to the viva experience I would anticipate, not least because the audience of my presentation but a few seemed totally aghast. This is what happens when you do a digital research methods/STS/performativity paper sat within a media policy panel. Oh well.

So I’ve found this Nasty PhD viva questions page, which doesn’t really contain any ‘nasty’ questions per se, at least not nasty in the sense of ‘viva from hell’ atmosphere presented in the Good Viva video, where the external examiner looks at their watch and asks the candidate to speed up their answer cause they’ll miss their train. Starting at the End contains a list of what the authors call ‘predictable’ questions which seem quite exhaustive – and I’m having a go at them – not sure if the insistence on the triad Research design – methodology – research methods applies for me – this may be more useful for social science theses or anthropology. I mean I’m sure I’ll have to talk a lot about my methodological choices and the analysis of my material but hopefully this will not take up 3/12 (1/4) of the total question count – as this article suggests. I’ve also found some answers to other kinds of viva preparation concerns, like what to listen to (the important stuff!). And so I’m extending what this post by Aleks Krotoski is trying to do (being calm and positive about the whole thing) by adding some abstract (I need some abstraction, or else) and not necessarily accurate answers to my partly complete

POSSIBLE VIVA QUESTION MAP (very linear presentation, but hey ho, it’s a blog)

1. why did you choose this topic? Because zizek & gaga jammed together at the UCU strike last March and communism knows no monster.

2. What led you to choose the framework of ‘posthumanist performativity’ (Barad 2003) as a theoretical component of your framework?

3. How did you use your conceptual framework for research design and analysis of the material? I / it unraveled.

4. Justify your choice of methodology and decision to use interviews, focus group, participant observation, issue crawler, discourse analysis and so on. (The level of abstraction is my answers here corresponds to the level of thought I’ve put into my actual answers!)

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.

But I’ve been rethinking about transmedia storytelling (stories unraveling across media forms) and our awareness, as users and consumers, of such practices, in marketing and art, after chairing the interesting plenary last week (at the Staging Illusions – Digital and cultural Fantasy conference) – where Astrid Ensslin (Bangor University) talked about the complex layering and the narrative movement across and between texts and media forms in online gaming.

I find quite intriguing however the way in which QR codes are becoming increasingly visible in physical everyday spaces and how artistic/academic practice seems to (once more) embrace these as signs of ubiquitous computing /and participation. For instance, Simone O’Callaghan combines QR codes with analogue artforms (she embeds them in printmaking) as part of her PhD at the University of Dundee, Scotland, in order to make technology, as she states, less intimidating to people. Jeff Watson is also working towards a PhD at Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and examines “transmedia interaction design, with an emphasis on the design and implementation of cross-platform pervasive games”. As he writes in his artist statement “My work is about the future of performance, play, and public space”.

Amazing – how the future is performatively produced through these discursive practices. As Sarah Kember said in her keynote address at the same conference (engaging with the work of Wendy Brown and Lucy Suchman) there are issues of privacy to be considered here, issues of personal and social boundaries (where is the off button in a smart home, as she put it) when, like a trojan horse, ambient intelligence will extract huge amounts of data from users.

Barry Keith Grant (2001), in the book chapter Strange days: Gender and ideology in new genre films, writes that in Strange Days Bigelow comments on the racist, misogynist gaze of Hollywood cinema – especially in relation to the generic characteristics of action film. For Grant, the director recasts these expectations, not only through the kick-ass character of Angella Bassett, but also through the retelling of Rodney King‘s story – in a version that ends in revolt. Watching the film now – when having violent kick-ass heroines in action movies is more common than it was in 1995 – I couldn’t ignore the sexualised violence of the film (the disturbing rape/murder scene) and of course the VR technology=masculine, naughty boy-toy kind of figuration that completely turns me off.

So yes, apart from watching old films and overiding CMOS passwords in old PC’s in my spare time (it feels so much better having a nice desktop tower under my desk after 4 years working on stupid laptops – the box is open and I peep into the cables from time to time – it’s like walking to the beach and touching the pebbles) – I’m reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossesed and find myself thinking and dreaming about non-propertarian, non-possesive ways of living and loving, as if I’m an idealistic teenager. But then there are other reasons I love this book – it’s the idea that people get together because of shared hardship (which reminds me of sharing salt and bread with someone – the very basics of survival – a greek saying about making a substantial connection with someone) – and that scene where Shevek talks his theory of time to the baby. I’ve also discovered this fun Study Guide for the book, in case you’re feeling really geeky!

A world that used to be dumb and unconnected now gets connected, and that information gets shared.

I find this amazing – not only the quote, but more generally Richard M. Satava’s presentation of this speculative (and perhaps emerging) technology – because it correlates intelligence with connectivity and communication. A tomato ‘telling’ me how ripe it is and a desk re-arranging itself as I enter the room: these object can be smart it seems because they exchange information – of course the tomato has been telling me how ripe it is from the beggining of time – so why would I need smart dust to mediate between the tomato and me? Why do I need a new range of institutions and control systems setting new thresholds of quality and ripeness and who knows what other standards between me (the dumper consumer) and the tomato.

Smartdust according to the wikipedia entry is a hypothetical system of microelectromechanical systems (MEMs) like sensors, distributed on an area and wirelessly networked – a concept introduced, developed, and funded by DARPA due to the potential military applications of the technology (MEMs and nanomicroelectronic systems exist and are not at all speculative).

I find it interesting also how in this interview robots are framed as ‘informational systems’ exchanging information with the ‘information world’ – and how there is an attempted shift in understanding robots from  machines or extensions of bodies to networked systems. Speaking of surgery, robots and bodies, I’m also looking at earlier speculative fiction & nanotechnology at the moment – I’m reading Isaac Asimov’s Fantastic Voyage at the moment where a group of people enter the body of another human, in an effort to cure him. (Even the trailer for the 1966 film is intersesting in terms of gender politics).

As my guide to cultural fantasy and public ideas about nanotechnology, I’m following the now discontinued but nevertheless excellent blog Howard Lovy’s NanoBot. I’m also reading the edited colection Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, and planning a project around these emerging technologies. So I’m also reading this Living book about Human Genomics: From Hypothetical Genes to Biodigital Materialisations, which gives an overview of human genomics as a scientific field and a consumer interface. Of special interest to me is how central consumers are in genomics and the complex way media environments are becoming biodigital. The question to ask is I guess how these biodigital materialisations and other emerging technologies are today shifting the concept of informational to networked.

(See Joanna Zylinska’s blog about the Living Books about Life series)

So I came across the US-based Digital Sisterhood project which seems interesting – and features various feminist voices on a web site, online radio show, Twitter page, and Tweetchats – and even organised events like an online yoga session. I also came across the article Class, the Digital and (Immaterial) Feminism by Jennifer Cotter in THE RED CRITIQUE 13 (Fall/Winter 2008) – which basically builds its entire critique around a reading of Judy Wajcman’s TechnoFeminism, and argues that within digital capitalist conditions

“women are not freed from deepening exploitation and the deterioration of their economic conditions of life in transnational capitalism, even when some become techno-managers”.

and brutally that

“Immaterial feminism is liberal feminism, and liberal feminism is an ally of transnational capitalism, not of exploited women”.

A bit abrasive, but never mind. Then I also found this Queer & Feminist New Media Spaces post in the HASTAC site (which I admittedly visit too often lately for postdoc announcements on the other side of the Atlantic), which gives a review and lists some interesting questions in the end. I run across this older Montreal based Feminist interventions – Locative media project by Andrea Zeffiro (a doctoral candidate in Communication at Concordia University in 2008 when the post was written) which, in a reflection, concludes that

“A critical pedagogical approach – in which social, political and economic factors are made apparent prior to production – will sharpen the necessary tools, enabling feminist curiosities to excavate locative media”.

Luckily, I also found something which is forthcoming (17th of November) – the DIGITAL SITES/QUEER CIRCULATIONS: TRACING ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS AND GLBTQ COMMUNITIES organised by Mary L Gray (Indiana University) – and I’ll check back for the abstracts.

I’m not organising ngender this year (after two years of involvement) but Rachel Wood, whose doctoral research is about passing & space, is. Rachel’s work on Sarah Waters & queer London will also be published in the same forthcoming Lesbian Studies special issue (‘Revolting Bodies: Desiring Lesbians’) as my article The mediation of community and revolt in online genderqueer porn. The Ngender call is open to non-Sussex researchers – so go for it! See below.

Call for Papers

• Ø  Digital Technologies and Social Change
• Ø  Sexualities
• Ø  Representation
• Ø  Everyday Practises
• Ø  Histories of Gender
• Ø  Cultural Production
• Ø  Transsexuality, Transgender and Intersexuality
• Ø  The Body and Embodiment
• Ø  Literature and Linguistics
• Ø  Media and Film
• Ø  Religions and Spirituality
• Ø  Feminisms
• Ø  Geographies
• Ø  Postcolonialism
• Ø  Arts and Art History
• Ø  Masculinities
• Ø  Development