Synthetic Performances: Sylvere Lotringer, Second Life, and the Politics of Perversions
“I don’t deny that my client was carrying a bomb. But this doesn’t prove he was going to use it. After all, I myself always carry with me all I’d need to commit a rape.”- 19th century French lawyer M. Henri de Rochefort defending his client, an anarchist, caught with a bomb.
What are we to make of the recent Supreme Court ruling on United States v. Williams? Now, just telling someone you have child pornography on your computer is a federal offense — even if you don’t. The New York Times wrote an editorial against the Supreme Court’s decision, explaining how, as much as they’d rather not stand on the perceived side of a child pornographer, “this law is drawn in a way that also criminalizes speech that should be protected by the First Amendment.”
Justice Scalia wrote there’s no “possibility that virtual child pornography or sex between youthful-looking adult actors might be covered by the term ‘simulated sexual intercourse,’” which further muddles this issue. Saying you have fake child porn is illegal, but the images are perfectly ok — no matter how skilled the photoshopping? A Boing Boing reader who once worked at Industrial Light + Magic, explained it well:
The first film adaptation of “Lolita” was directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962. As a concession to the MPAA, Kubrick raised Lolita’s age to fourteen, and largely desexualized her relationship with Humbert. As directed by Adrian Lyne (9 1/2 Weeks, Fatal Attraction), the 1997 version attempted to be truer to the source novel in those respects, and even showed a topless Lolita in the bedroom with Humbert.This is where my co-worker came in. Since the filmmakers were not legally able to film their underage actress topless in a sexual situation, they filmed her with a beige body stocking with X’s of electrical tape where her nipples would have been. They then re-filmed the same scene with a rather busty (but entirely legal) 18-year-old actress. My friend was then given the task of seamlessly tracking and compositing the nekkid 18-year-old bosoms onto the 14-year-old body.
Obviously there’s a difference between a professional VFX artist performing such manipulation for the sake of art, and some anonymous perv performing such manipulation for the sake of, er, self-manipulation. But how does one discriminate between these two goals? And more importantly, how does one /legally/ differentiate them? Defining what is and isn’t “art” has never been something that the legal system has shown itself to be particularly adept at.
“Virtual child pornography” is illegal in most countries, with many complications. Here its illegality is debatable. Lolita adaptations and hentai are exactly the kinds of things that could potentially be policed, as graphic images are prohibited under “obscenity” laws. (Virtual Bind explains the subtitles of this law.)
So what is child pornography, if it is not obscene? Everyone rational knows Bill Henson doesn’t deserve his current legal battle, nor do the many other artists who have found themselves defending their work to an excessively prude legal system. Philips Adams in his editorial “Lock up Lewis Carroll” points out the “paradox that nude photography of prepubescent girls was very popular in a Victorian society usually characterised as prudish.”
J.M. Barrie … would be viewed with deep suspicion today. The story of the boy who never grew up begins with a boy who never grew up, James himself. Just hours before his 14th birthday James’s brother David drowned in a skating accident and his mother took to her bed to weep for years. Realising that he came a poor second in his mother’s affections, James would try to get her attention by wearing David’s clothes.
He would write about lost mothers in adult novels as well as Peter Pan, and was happiest in the company of little boys. A pedophile? Perhaps, in a sense. But, as with Carroll, he has given a great gift to generations of children.
So what might seem simple isn’t. Although Barrie would certainly come under scrutiny today and invite trouble from the police, his tragic story should remind us to be cautious about moral panics. Does Henson have some psychological problems like Carroll and Barrie? No idea, but his photographs are a long way from Wonderland and Neverland. As prints sell for about $30,000, his audience is decidedly adult, affluent and very small. Until the present scandal, a few thousand might visit a Henson exhibition. Now business will boom; the censor is always the best publicist.
I read Sylvere Lotringer’s Overexposed: Perverting Perversions sometime just before the decision on United States v. Williams, and it’s further made me question child pornography laws. The book is blurbed by William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Kathy Acker. If you love any of those three authors (or all three, as I do,) you’ll really enjoy it.
The book explains aversion therapy (think A Clockwork Orange) as it was administered to sex offenders at Chicago’s Center for Sexual Behavior in the the 1980s. (The center no longer exists.) Lotringer brings up so many important points on how “perversions have no grammar of their own,” I’m surprised this book isn’t widely read.
Aversion therapy, as Lontringer explains, is really “boredom therapy.” From a review in Modern Painters: “While Lotringer is no satirist, his objections to the methods of (the composite character) Dr. Sachs and those like him are not so removed from those of Burgess. Our problem, as Lotringer sees it, is that we live in a Christian/Freudian world in which we are made to fear our awareness of our own capacity for free thinking; it is always the strategy of power to make us believe that we must be protected against ourselves. From the viewpoint of behavioral psychology, we are the first line of defense against our own fantasies and must be made to police ourselves for telltale signs of some psychic queerness… he in fact initially pitched Overexposed as a follow-up to The History of Sexuality. That it isn’t, due in part to his impatient assertions and his far-reaching aspirations. The author wants us to believe that in one therapy he has found the root of everything wrong with our culture.”
Nevertheless it makes for some interesting reading:
“What are you doing after the orgy?” Jean Baudrillard allegedly asked his partner in the middle of it all. Orgy, like the spectacle, is permanent. It’s not God’s death, but, boredom, American style. It’s the anxiety of the bulimic, the martyrdom of the obese, the obsessive fear of all those who monstrously consume themselves, out of sheer self-exhaustion, in order to better disappear…the great linguist Roman Jakobson rejected the idea of a language spoken by a single person as a “perverse fiction.” Idiolect was a kind of loner language prowling on the outskirts of communication. Now, it seems, the entire world has become idiolectal, speaking to no one, since communication now communicates nothing but itself.
I’d love to quote this book in its entirety, but this post is already long and that would be time consuming, but I will point out a few other interesting points. He explains how tenderness is usually expressed by l and m words, but k, t, and r, consonants tend to be used on words signifying aggression. “‘R,‘ which is produced erecta ad palatum lingua, is always associated with phallic violence. The same phenomena are said to exist in the language of chimpanzees, and, significantly, the Tibetans.”
Really intriguing was a section explaining how the psychiatrist would tease a normal desire out of what seemed to be a perversion. To give an PG-13 example: someone who gets off on the fantasy of a woman naked and hogtied, will, under examination, respond to the word breast, but not “rope” or “bound.” It’s not the binding he is drawn to, (not that there’s anything wrong with tying women up in good consensual fun.) The fantasy works with the right calculus of rote and forbidden. Another fantasy involving exposed breasts might be just as much of an erotic trigger. Context is important. Could the attraction several embarrassed men have drunkenly confessed to me, toward Natalie Portman in The Professional, be not her then delicate age, but the expectation of what she’d grow up to be?
What are we to make of Amanda Knox’s rape fantasy fiction or Cho Seung-Hui’s violent plays. And might we interpret the same of the so many people who fantasize outside the bounds of sexual conventions, but act out nothing? Did Bataille fuck an eye?
I first wrote about United States v. Williams last year, as it related to Second Life. Since then, Linden Labs has banned “age play,” even though it seems to fall within the non-obscene virtual child pornography limits.
The title of this post I stole from “Synthetic Performances,” a series of reenactments of historical performance art pieces, like Chris Burden’s Shoot, Vito Acconci’s Seedbed, and Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s Imponderabilia, set inside Second Life by (the avatars) of Eva and Franco Mattes. It is now showing at the Netherlands Media Art Institute. (via.) What makes it so amusing is the absence of shock value, indicative of all sexual activity on Second Life as seen by outsiders. It’s pathetic and comedic, no more pornographic than Barbie dolls positioned in a lewd way.
Images by Balthus
Related links
- Overexposed:Perverting Perversions , MIT Press
- Review of Overexposed in Modern Painters
- The Center for Sex Offender Management
- Brooklyn Rail interviews Sylvere Lotringer
- Don’t Look in the Basement
- Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille
- Debate over Scorpion’s Virgin Killer.
- Wired, Inside Operation Candyman, the FBI’s crusade to sweep the Net clean of child abuse. (2001)
- Valleywag, “Sex Shopping in Second Life”
- New York magazine, Saving Justin Berry
- Debbie Nathan’s article on why journalists should have permission to see child pornography
- Fair, Perilous Reporting (On Debbie Nathan and Kurt Eichenwald)
- Does Snuff Exist? Google Video
- New Jersey sex offenders banned from internet, Ars Technica
- CNN, Who star released on bail
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