Can computers, software, and new technologies in general, be a companion in social transformation and for new forms of collectivity? Not in terms of organizing and channeling action, but by incorporating object orientation and emerging forms of subjectivities. That is to of think software design instead of designing with software.
I like to discuss here seduction as an aesthetical practice in everyday communication, a specific modus and code of communication. I see seduction as a technology of desire, that alters ways we communicate and bond with each other, as well as with software, that is to say on- and offline. It is part of a larger und sexier project, lets call it Software of the Future, to embrace what new technologies have brought to us and going all the way, instead of making it fit into old and familiar cultural paradigms and trajectories. I will argue here, that one of those glimpses into other futures is the emergence of reversibility with networked interactive media.
What does technology want?
The discussion about artificial intelligence has by large been driven by the question if machines are able to think. Technologies are becoming more and more autonomous, which basically means, they are an integral part of our daily lives and our lives become more dependent on them. As they become sophisticated, objects in their own rights, they have inspired people to ask, what technologies wants. A very influential book by Kevin Kelly pulled this question. No one would of course object when we say that machines don?t have a desire. It can only be debated around a metaphor.
I feel it is no coincidence, that Kelly posed the question in a moment of history, when it is clear, that technology brings a major rupture and social transformation into our lives. Computers and software are used a tools for more productivity, efficiency and problem solving, while the social or society somehow seems to lag behind. Maybe we feel this constant and accelerating rupture all the more violently and harder because it clashes against an outdated social order.
Kelli?s analysis is informed by biological and scientific terms. Narrating a history of technology like that of cultural evolution, he stresses the diversity of tools, a process from generality to specificity. He grants technology a new status amongst humans, which he calls the technicum:
?In addition to technology?s ability to satisfy (and create) desires, and to occasionally save labor, it did something else. It brought new opportunities. ? Online networks
unleashed passions, compounded creativity, amplified generosity.?
Kelly is right to assume that what technology wants, is what we want. But who is we, really? It becomes a matter of open discussion, and public response. But instead Kelly is very quick to give answers. His argumentation is based on some ?natural? want, some drive, to grow and to live and survive, according to the laws of physics. This makes it seem, that the trajectory of the technicum is inevitable.
Kelly asks himself indeed if we are prone to just swallow up the inevitable. The problem is with his system of inevitability: It?s just one side of a dialectical dynamic. His analysis is not mediated through thought, there is no negative instance. Instead, pure energy opens to infinite potentialities without any resistance, physical or mental, as if it extended into an empty space. It is the old version, that the only choices we have is to either control or surrender powerless to the rules of nature. Kelly seems not aware about his projections into an evolutionary narrative, from his blind position of subject. Essentially, that makes him a technological determinist.
Speaking of digital technologies, he doesn?t take into account that is it programmed. There is a programmer, usually male, and white, who inscribes his own desires and social values into it. I want to argue, that our Western Culture is dominated by male desires, which refers technology a certain place. In this place, computers are subjected and subordinated to our intentions and desires. They serve to make work easier for us, to be commanded and controlled, to be at our feet. In this sense, it isn?t granted any autonomy. Although we anthropomorphize computers, we don?t grant them freedom. What does freedom and autonomy actually mean to us? A proper reflection of cultural, and critical theory as well as philosophy is missing in this book.
But there is one aspect worth keeping from Kellies Reading. This is the phenomenological approach of listening to the other, which lies at the heart of object-orientation. When we listen carefully, we recognize some changes that may allow a glimpse into other futures of sociality. What kind of futures have we been imagining since the beginning of the machine age? They don?t really include radical ideas about changes in human society. It is usually about some super intelligent computer or alien threatening the human species, while the world of the future looks very familiar to us. To take a look at science fiction, there are only few queer narratives: Theodore Sturgeon: The World well lost (first depiction of homosexuality), Samuel DeLaney, Geoff Ryman?s The Child, Garden, Ursula LeGuin, and some of Cyberpunk Literature. Yet, the queer project is exactly about alternative futures of societies, the question of the other, the alien, not in a dualist sense of the Cartesian subject, which is sovereign in this world, thanks to his rational thinking and reason, but which is already in this world, with other objects, other living organisms.
Once we draw our attention from artificial thinking and intelligence to artificial life, something that moves, is alive, we set something else in motion. We deal with emotions beyond the Cartesian Dualism. The queer theorist Jack Halberstam observes a shift in moving pictures, in his Book The queer Art of Failure. In there, he discusses the difference between stop-motion and digital animation, and the emergence of new narratives of the relationship of the individual to the mass. In animation movies like Toy Story and Fantastic Mr. Fox, animals, humans and other creatures are animated and hence all become just a set of selves:
?the individual character .. serves as a gateway to intricate
stories of collective action, anticapitalist critique, group bonding, and alternative imaginings of community, space, embodiment, and responsibility.?
Image-problems of desire
While Technology is something useful, desire has often been considered something very dangerous. This becomes apparent if we look at the history of their control and punishment by religion or metaphysical politics since Plato, that are the heritage to hetero-normative culture today.
Desires belong to the realm opposed to rationality. For the rational ideology, desire was pushing for a wrong kind of concept of the subject. The subject, giving in on his own desires, without employing thinking and reason into his actions, becomes slave to his or her own desires. It is not in control and hence is a danger to the social public. It is not a properly functioning subject in society and needs punishment, disciplinary controls or medical treatment. Our culture says yes to sex, but only for reproduction and in the family and the private, please. Desires are therefore institutionally controlled.
Also, queer theories prefer to refer to pleasures and bodies (a famous slogan by Foucault), instead of desires, which Freud connected to sex drives as a natural given.
We know however from a Lacanian psychoanalysis, that desires are also dynamic, in the sense that they are made. We learn to desire and what to desire.
Desires have a negative connotation within anti-capitalist groups, because it is taken up by advertising and marketing. Advertising creates desires and the illusion of the possibility of their consumption. Since desire is often related to the libidinal sex drive, it is seen as the irreversibly energy on which capital drives. The fear is often expressed, that to be seduced by the system means to buy into neo-liberal economies and its suppressive features. Being seduced is therefore equivalent with the notion of giving up freedom.
For me desire, understood in a queer way, expresses some need, lust, attraction, something connected to my body, to my own situatedness in a place and time, perceived with the senses, connected to my thinking. Saying so, it is an aesthetical category. Something, which remains undeterminable. Desire, tight to the body, is also a very immediate communication with the world. In human communication, less than 20% is verbal. The rest is body language. Let?s not forget that we build intimate relationships by sensing, feeling and touching the other.
Reversibility in seduction
With Jean Baudrillard, seduction takes on the form of a free play of appearances. His major project was to replace the exchange logic of production, the utilitarian ideology, with a symbolical exchange based on seduction. Baudrillard identifies seduction with a feminine principle. It is that which is radically outside the phallic order of masculine and feminine.
Baudrillard speaks of seduction of having a secret, not something hidden, but one could say its aesthetic value: consuming the pleasures themselves, without any instrumental use. Seduction is based on reversibility, uncertainty and infinity, because this game potentially never ends, contrary to sex, which usually ends with a climax: the orgasm. The goal is not to have sex, but just to enjoy. It is the potential for reversibility that interests me here and that I will further explore.
I like to illustrate this with his reading of Soren Kierkegaard?s Diary of the seducer. Johannes a young man of society, and an expert in seduction, is especially attracted to Cordelia. She has the appearance of someone genuine, innocent, untouched, self-sufficient, not conscious of her own actions. She is the figure of ideal femininity that he wants to consume. He takes pleasure in her innocence and consumes the game itself. The focus is on his pleasure to love her, which really means, to make her love him. His love for her is faithful, honest and pure. So, he isn?t interested in loving her ethically; meaning marriage for him is just a social contract without love. In this sense, loving other women doesn?t betray his love for her.
Seduction, as Baudrillard claims, is mutual and reversible. Both partners are engaged in the game of seduction. In order to seduce, the other must be willing to be seduced. Yet, the narrative in Diary of the seducer goes strictly from seducer/male to seductress/female. The feminine seductive powers only circle around her innocence, her unawareness of her beauty. He seems to imply that the feminine starts the seduction, he is seducing the male into the game of seduction. That is her power. In the story, Cordelia not only looses her innocence, her potential power. She is introduced into the art of seduction. Johannes finally looses interest in her. So, Cordelia remains in the role of the one being seduced. Here, the seduction is only halfway reversible. She is more or less just a puppet (for male desire). For Baudrillard she becomes a dead object for him.
Juliane Rebentisch, Professor of philosophy and aesthetics, offers another reading of the Diary of the Seducer in her book The Art of Freedom. According to Rebentisch, Cordelia is not only the seduced, instead Cornelia?s development throughout the seduction results in her emancipation as object: Her innocence, this state pre-reflexive, is another description of an object. The tragedy for Johannes is that through his games of seduction, he seduces her to become self-reflexive. In Johannes words: ? I turned her into a man. What for Baudrillard turns into a dead object becomes here actually a self-reflexive other, in other words: she becomes a subject.
Rebentisch wants to stress with her reading of Kierkegaard, that subjectivity only arrive through a constant exchange with our environment. We are affected by it, and constantly experience the difference to ourselves. That?s how self-reflexivity comes into being. This is what Adorno calls the Dialectic of freedom: Without the recourse to the pre-me, this response, which is in a sense a bodily response, something we can only sense, because it hasn?t been channeled through our consciousness, there is no possibility for freedom.
In the erotic play of seduction, there is always something, which escapes a direct understanding, which makes for the attraction of the other. Something that shakes my own subjectivity and escapes any identification. Rebentisch links this to the potential for change. We cannot either fully know ourselves, nor the other. By accepting this, we accept a fundamental freedom in its potentialities to learn new things. Herein also lies the potential for democratic power. It is a power that accepts, that it has to be accepted. It is a broken power. [ibd. p. 318] Just like seduction, it is based on the principle of reversibility. So, freedom is located or emerges from this tiny gap between sensibilities and thought. Before it is even conscious to us. Freedom is not some metaphysical or universal absolute thing. It is this potential in us, fluent and fragile. Just as subjectivity, gender, and desires are fluent. We need not only to rethink our relationships with others, but also to refeel them. Going beyond rationality and irrationality. Towards a more unified understanding of mind and body. How can we do that? Maybe with technologies of desire! I like to suggest that we re-learn to build intimate relationships with other human beings, animals, computers, listen to them, ready to be seduced, treat them as alive.
Now, I find problematic with Baudrillard, that he doesn?t seem to question the ?natural? given order of male and female. He assumes that the male is the seducer and the female the being seduced. Baudrillard says, she has already started the seduction and Johannes only enters the challenge as defense, but only to attack later on. His diary entries are in fact filled with war vocabulary. Johannes therefore remains in a male strategy that Rousseau has identified with a logic of attack and defense. We will see in a second that those desires and their techniques of war are deeply installed in new technologies. What if we replace the weapons with technologies of desire: the aesthetic, pleasurably play on the level of communication and software design. Not to conquer, dominate, erase and possess, but to give and receive, challenge, play, surprise, learn and make new experiences?
Seduction here is by no means equal to manipulation. It is a common misunderstanding that seduction means to make a person do something against its will. That implies a goal other than the circulation of pleasure. Indeed, in a game of seduction that relies on a fixed cast of male heroism and female innocence, there is reason to fear of being seduced. Feared to be included and rendered neutral or invisible by the system. Female emancipation was hysterically revolting, trying to occupy their body with their own pleasures, resisting and not playing the game of seduction. The calls for equal rights have them today included into the hetero-normative matrix, in which men still rule. Because the male subjectivity has not been shaken by the other.
So first, let?s queer Baudrillard?s proposal and radicalize this for a queer practice of confusing the norms and breaking down gendered binaries. We need to link the play of appearances back to the body, to desire and the possibility for emergence and change. I like to introduce role play to engage in a more proper way of reversibility. What I feel is missing from what we have learned so far, that male subjectivity have missed out on being seduced, to play the bottom and experience a distance to his subjectivity, as the ruler of the word, for whom only dead objects, free to his disposal, exist. I feel many women should once make the experience to be top. We can learn here from SM or BDSM practices. These are consensus games, in which two people, whatever their gender take on the roles of either top or bottom. They make the experience of either having power or being deprived of it. Finally to maybe turn domination into caring.
What if we apply this excessive play of seductive communication to technology? Seduction escapes the logic of supply and demand, the useful exchange. Seduction and sexuality really stand for an excessive exchange, that is not based on the women as exchange value, as an object to be possessed, not love as a thing that can be possessed, but that needs constant seduction, attraction and push back, guaranteeing the freedom of the development of subjectivity and leave room for potentials unknown, ideas unknown.
?By contrast, for us the social is without seduction. [?.] Relative to the dangers of seduction that haunt the universe of games and rituals, our own sociality and the forms of communication and exchange it institutes, appear in direct proportion to their secularization under the sign of the Law, as extremely impoverished, banal and abstract.?
That means communication inside the binary mechanistic logic remains reductive, it plays with the fixed signs. Reductionist feedback loops and circuits in closed digital binary systems only mirror themselves. B:
?The media seduce the masses, the masses seduce themselves.?
Baudrillard relates those feedback loops to a culture, which is essentially narcissistic:
It is what we see mostly online, there is mostly: ?Dude, look what I have done, like me, love me?? We are seduced by the manipulation of the choices. It is so easy, to put oneself out there. Everything seems within reach. We bring the world closer to us, but a simplified version without other.
Dominant desires in new technologies
Desires online also follow a hetero-normative pattern. In fact, male desires have deeply penetrated into the software design and digital culture. There are many examples of desires for domination and control and its techniques of attack and defense. To remind you, the internet was a military invention. But also popular features such as geo-location services like GPS have military origin. The US department of defense maintains the servers. The privatization and commercialization expresses the dominant male desire to grow, posses and win and reach all sorts of climaxes. I believe the most successful branches online are pornography and poker games. Just to give you two examples:
Honey, Its me App provides lonely guys with a virtual girlfriend. She will video call 4 times a day and send messages, like ?Are you still sleeping? Time for breakfast!? and ?Good night, sweet dreams?.
She is purely there for the man to consume her. She is virtual, that means literally dead. She is like Cordelia for Johannes in the 19th century, when women were solely company for men.
TapThat, an app, in which two devises are linked together. by tapping on the image you ?fuck? the other. The avatars moan while you tap them. An example for pure mechanist phone sex, nothing erotic here. The goal is only to reach climax:
Reversibility in Social Media
However, there is something in social media, that we could call the emergence of reversibility. The network structure of the Internet, a multi-directional communication medium has changed the one-way consumption of mass culture (cinema, tv, magazines etc). As with TV on demand for example, the entertainment industry has understood the potential of new media and interactivity. It doesn?t cater anymore to a mass market. It does push individuality instead of billboarding to the consumer individual.
?More is different.? says the Author of the Long Tail, Chris Anderson. When you aggregate a lot of something, it behaves in new ways, and our new communication tools are aggregating our individual ability to create and share, at unprecedented levels of more.
With programmed software, there is a range of choices, but there is no real freedom either for the machine, or for the user. But once it becomes social ? a confusing mix of machines and human users -, there is something already escaping the closed circuits and feedback loops of Web2.0. Seduction techniques by advertising are slowly shifting from creating desires to listening to the user?s desires. In this shift, signs of reversibility become most apparent. It gives users and consumers new powers. Consumer and user choices, are today among the few, that have an almost immediate impact. But with Shitstorms for example, they remain in a purely negative form of expression. There is no seduction here. Since they are listening to us, why not using this power, why not seducing them in return?
How can we design applications that take advantage of this and radicalize it? Technologies infused with desire. Technology allows for this reversibility, seduction allows for this reversibility, we just never imagined it, thought it, nor practiced it, because the roles in hetero-normative cultural order seem to clear between seducer and seductress, active and passive, dominant and submissive, master and slave.
True innovation and true creativity, stems from changing the rules of the game, by excessive demands beyond utility, under patriarchal rule. Maybe men have never been seduced. The system hasn?t been seduced, so it continues to treat everything, as if there was no other, as if it was dead. It treats software and digital technologies as dead objects.
Lets put desires of pleasure before desires of climax. Lets seduce each other on the level of language. Lets engage in, and experience all kinds of levels of love and care, bypassing the ideology of the possession of the other. We should not repeat the rational or religious ideology, of prohibiting and suppressing. If the project for freedom should continue, to deprive it of desire is to stop any dynamic and any chance for transformation. Same for seduction, if you close yourself to seduction, let others make the rules of the game and stay dead.
How radical and dangerous desire is, is demonstrated daily in repressive political regimes. Juridical equality of homosexuals is a dream far from reality and suppressed in many countries. Discrimination is not only an instrument to distract from other political issues. That would undermine the power of desires. Those regimes put control over human desires that reach beyond common social bonds and collectivity. Because only god knows what would happen if we felt alive.
Source: http://neuneun.com/2013/02/on-seduction-a-technology-of-desire/
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