k-punk: CONTINUOUS CONTACT

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k-punk

" Simon's interview with CCRU (1998) |

Main<br>| Rufige Rummaging "

January 23, 2005

CONTINUOUS CONTACT

Why do I hate talking on the phone, but find MSN messenger so compulsive?

Partly it is because phones are too intrusive. Not because they impose an unwanted intimacy but for exactly the opposite reason. In a typical telephone conversation, you are forced into (re)assuming your assigned social role. Switching out of MSN to talk on a phone is to be forced away from intimacy, back into the Face, back into the established protocols of mammalian interaction. With MSN, however, the ambiguity and novelty of the medium � when using internet messaging, are we speaking or writing? � allows for more slippage. If we tend to say that we will �speak� later on MSN, it is not because we are falling into phonocentrism, but, quite to the contrary, because we are aware that this is a mode of communication which combines speaking with writing, or rather typing (which should not be reduced to writing).

Zizek also provides a clue. In The Fragile Absolute, Zizek illustrates Lacan�s distinction between two types of enjoyment, as outlined by Lacan in Seminar XX: Encore, by referring to male and female uses of the web. �On the one hand [heh heh � k-p],� he writes, �we have the closed, ultimately solipsistic, circuit of drives which find their satisfaction in idiotic masturbatory (autoerotic) activity, in the perverse circulating around objet petit a as the object of a drive. On the other hand, there are subjects for whom access to jouissance is much more closely linked to the domain of the Other�s discourse, to how they not so much talk, as are talked about: say, erotic pleasure hinges on the seductive talk of the lover, on the satisfaction provided by speech itself, not just on the act in its stupidity. And does not this contrast explain the long-observed difference in how the sexes relate to cyberspace sex? Men are much more prone to use cyberspace as a masturbatory device for their solitary playing, while women are more prone to participate in chatrooms, using cyberspace for seductive exchanges of speech.�

While men wait for high-resolution webcams which will show everything, women trade words. The fact that both MSN and txting are predominantly used by females is indicative of a more general libidinal difference in how the two sexes have tended to relate to both technology and language.

Some remarks by Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One are instructive here, but we have to be careful, since they are capable of misinterpretation if read too quickly. �[W]oman�s autoeroticism,� Irigaray writes, �is very different from man�s. In order to touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman�s body, language� And this self-caressing requires at least a minimum of activity. As for woman, she touches herself in and of herself without any way to distinguish activity from passivity. Woman �touches� herself all the time, and moreover no-one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two � but not divisible into one(s) � that caress each other.�

It is crucial to avoid subsuming what Irigaray is saying here into familiar but inaccurate narratives about women being �excluded� from language. Such a claim would be too easily refuted by a welter of banal empirical observation: the female investment in MSN and txt is only the latest manifestation of an intense female involvement in epistolary technologies. As everyone knows, there was a strong relationship between the epistolary and the novel, both formally and in terms of content (formally, consider the complex implexed epistolary structure of Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein and Dracula; as for content, it is impossible to imagine any of the great literary romances proceeding without letters). And of course, the novel itself began as a Gothic romance, produced by and for women. As Austen�s Northanger Abbey demonstrates, Gothic romances were very precisely a means of women �turning each other on� (and not only sexually). As a propagative erototechnology, the novel was itself a mode of Gothic propagation, the reading of which enabled women to literally � and literarily � enjoy themselves, exploring the spine-chilling thrills that lay beyond the pleasure principle. The scandal, from the POV of patriarchal specularity, was that this enjoyment was both in full view � women would openly read novels in public � but fundamentally inaccessible to the male gaze (what they were doing to themselves could not be seen by men).

No: Irigaray�s point is not about women�s exclusion from language, but about their libidinal incapacity to use it. Men experience themselves as not imbricated in language or technology, but as their users. In fact, and this point is crucial, the assumption of a transcendent, Promethean position in relation to language and technology is what it is...