MediaTropes eJournal Vol IV, No 1 (2013): 65–82 ISSN 1913-6005 INFO NYMPHOS ERIKA BIDDLE You don’t make love anymore because it’s dangerous, because sometimes there are problems—one person may not be very skilled or the situation may get messy. So you use a kind of machine, a machine that transfers physical and sexual contact by waves…. What is at play is no longer the connector rod in its housing, but the loss of what is most intimate in our experience of the body.… In cybersex, one sees, touches, and smells. The only thing one can’t do is taste the saliva or semen of the other. It’s a super-condom. —Paul Virilio (1995a) Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges, whose writings celebrate the sensual hyperreality of the world, famously struggled with deteriorating vision. He was such a voracious reader that he read himself blind. Fittingly then, Borges once wrote, “everything touches everything.” Developments in network culture bear this out (see Terranova 2004).1 New communications technologies enable the constant mobility of bodies and information; networks of people, ideas and interests continuously oscillate and grow in changing social landscapes that provide opportunities for digital frottage via always-on interactivity; interactive 1 As Terranova (2004, p. 1) explains it, “To think of something like a ‘network culture’ at all, to dare to give one name to the heterogeneous assemblage that is contemporary global culture, is to try to think simultaneously the singular and the multiple, the common and the unique” about the hyperconnectivity and informational overabundance characteristic of contemporary network societies. www.mediatropes.com MediaTropes Vol IV, No 1 (2013) Erika Biddle / 66 fields of experience become immersive lifeworlds. In these relational and fluctuating fields of affinity, mental and libidinal energies engage on an informational plane, provoking erotic contact between bodies and machines to produce new forms of social control and subjectivization. Theorists such as Michel Foucault, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Tiqqun have discussed the development of a socialization of control that is coextensive with the “information society.” In his “Postscript on Control Societies” (1995), Deleuze extends Foucault’s periodization of regimes of power in Discipline and Punish from the disciplinary power of modernity (biopolitics) onward to what he calls “control societies” (dividuation).2 For Deleuze, control societies mark a shift in dispositif wherein “power relations come to be expressed through the action at a distance of one mind on another” (Lazzarato, 2006, p. 186). Deleuze attributes this movement to the rapid development of communications and informational technologies during the cybernetic turn of the post-World War II era and the mechanisms and techniques of control they enable. Lazzarato extends this analysis of power and technology in control societies from the physical body to subjectivity—or the body’s “psychic life.” As Tiqqun (2001, p. 33) suggests, the post-World War II development of cybernetic capitalism has steadily involved a generalization of self-control, or, “a disposition that favors the proliferation of devices, and ensures any effective relay.” What this statement effectively expresses is capital’s efforts to dominate by its imperative to connect, to stay in the grip of control. This article will investigate the transformation of subjectivities and new forms of social control through this imperative as it manifests in technological advances in communicative media and human-computer interaction (HCI). Considering a selection of contemporary social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and online porn, it will examine modes of performativity and participation on the Internet as forms of haptic control. While haptics are traditionally thought to directly involve touch (“haptic” is Greek for “touch” or “grasp”), it may be more broadly understood as forms of non-verbal 2 From Foucault to Deleuze, the control diagram mutates from territorialization to deterritorialization, from segmentation to perpetuation, from enclosures to open distributed networks, from the external division of masses of bodies as a control mechanism (individuation) to the internal division of bodies into measurable and adjustable parameters as a control mechanism (dividuation). Bogard (2007) provides a definition for dividuation that’s among the clearest I’ve read: dividuation is “the internal division of entities into measurable and adjustable parameters, in the way, for instance, a digital sound sample is divided into separate parameters of tone, pitch, or velocity.” www.mediatropes.com MediaTropes Vol IV, No 1 (2013) Erika Biddle / 67 communication and somatic feedback. As William Bogard (2007) explains, haptic control is “not just the control of touch but rather a technical and social program for the adjustment of sensibility as a whole, including proprioceptive awareness, the body’s internal sense of its own position and movement relative to the outside world.” The immersivity of haptic forms is thus co-evolving with the Internet’s capacity to control at a distance. With the hyperconnectivity these communications technologies enable, capitalism’s modes of desire and anxiety are inscribed in bodies as processes wherein devices and their users have become increasingly adaptive to each other. We are learning to experience the body as a medium, rewiring our brains for new affects and learning from how machines learn. Haptic Control at a Distance: From Pleasure to Performativity The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent-office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses. —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1885)3 In 1958, at the height of the Cold War, the United States Department of Defense created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In 1969, ARPA hooked up the first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET— an experimental computer network—and a new universe was born. After a decade of development, in 1983, the TCP/IP protocol, which is still the standard used today, was launched. In 1988, the US Federal Networking Council approved the use of the Internet for commerce. It was nineteen at the time, still a teenager by all accounts. In 1992, commercial entities offered Internet access to the general public for the first time in the form of the World Wide Web. Our subjectivities—with or without Internet access—have been networked ever since. As a correlate to this, in Deleuze’s notion of digital control societies, power is increasingly networked into every aspect of social life and 3 Regarded by many as a “McLuhanism” because of the subtitle to his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, this is Ralph Waldo Emerson writing on the emerging symbiosis between man and machines that was part of his larger project on solitude. www.mediatropes.com MediaTropes Vol IV, No 1 (2013) Erika Biddle / 68 “technology is social before it is technical” (1986, p. 40). Broadband has allowed for the creation of programs that constantly reach out to the Internet for updates in order to forestall death by pre-programmed obsolescence. Many basic applications cannot function without communicating over a network. The necessity of being on the Internet and connected to a server has been built into these utilities. The social feedback mechanisms that the Internet provides parallel the manner in which the programs we use are controlled at a distance. Proponents call this networking of techno-social spaces “ambient intimacy” (Reichelt, 2009) and claim that it enables people to keep in touch with a level of regularity and closeness that real time and distance conspire to make impossible. However, with every promise for connection comes an interface. On the one hand, there is journalist Clive Thompson’s (2007) argument that social media permit a tactile sense of community. He refers to this as “social proprioception.” If proprioception is the unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself, then social proprioception is an augmented capacity to sense the presence of those in your community while at the same time informing, or reinforcing, where you are in dynamic techno-social space. Almost two decades ago, Virilio (1995b) discussed this phenomenon in terms of “tactile perspective”: the ability to reach at a distance, to feel at a distance, amounting to the shifting of perspective toward a domain the audiovisual perspective of old had yet to encompass. He called this “tele-contact.” What Virilio describes is an early form of haptic control at a distance. Developments in haptic control have been marked by a series of shifts toward control from afar, toward the immaterial exertion of power. And yet the connectivity and intimacy that is promised by these new platforms forever retreats before the grasp of its users, in a manner that recalls Roland Barthes’s discussion of the striptease in Mythologies, a collection of critical articles on French mass culture in the 1950s. Barthes observes that one of the primary experiences of capitalism is its “look but don’t touch!” proviso for the things we most desire. At the core of capitalism’s aesthetic, then, is the seduction and refusal of the body. The striptease illustrates this performative phenomenon as it pertains to the lap dance, where the spectacle of erotic contact doubles as haptic control. Lap dance patrons know their desires will be unfulfilled, but this refusal is idealized, reworked in fantasy and becomes essential to the pleasure of the experience. Thus, the author states, “consumption can perfectly well be accomplished simply by looking” (1999, p. 79). www.mediatropes.com MediaTropes Vol IV, No 1 (2013) Erika Biddle / 69 As will be discussed in detail, contemporary social media users occupy the same position as the lap dance patron, only their experience is redoubled by the physical presence of the screen and the feedback mechanisms of interactivity.