from Nazli:

I, personally, was really shocked by Victor Burgin’s article “Jenni’s Room: Exhibitionism and Solitude”. The authorities have actually had interviews with her, (Ok I understand that according to Freud observation is not enough and you have to listen to what people have to say but that mostly happens during psychological treatment session) instead of suggesting her to go and see a psychologist if not a psychiatrist. I strongly believe that she is going through identity diffusion and she is fixated somewhere in one of her stages that she had to have gone through during her childhood. Her desire to expose herself to the outer world which she feels like she does not belong to is a way to receive the attention she did not probably from her caretakers and also an aim to stand as a differentiated individual. Her struggle is best described with the statement that says, “ The dormitory room is a transitional space. It lies between the primitive space of infantile omnipotence under maternal protection and the adult space of civil society.” She still needs experimentation in her life to become self-actualized. This a way of her to try to deal with her psychological problems and I think the authorities are not helping her since she gets what she wants. The voyeurs also do not help her by joining her little game.
I also really liked the metaphor of ‘striptease’ in describing the way she is revealed through the camera to everyone’s eyes. There is some concealment that creates more desire to view her. The camera seen as a ‘window’ was also very powerful. A window she opens to reveal herself to public in order to be satisfied, see that she is capable of getting attention and not to feel nostalgic with loneliness anymore. This window is similar to the window that the subjects in the “Screen Tests” were trying to open for themselves. The wanted to be seen in order to be famous by becoming objects for public gaze. It was so weird how each one of them engaged with the camera. Some were not moving at all, one could only see the movement of eyes, and some were making facial expressions and indirect performances with their tongues.
Peter Weibel’s article “Pleasure and the Panoptic Principle” was really striking and I enjoyed reading through it. Security has always been conceptualized under the terms of visibility but now is one supposed to think that actually invisibility leads to more secure environments? Also are exhibitionism and voyeurism becoming social norms rather than private experiences? The article poses many questions that cannot be directly answered but make one think. Maybe the real things are the ones that escape the natural human eye and the rest are all images or hallucinations that are created mostly through media. “ In the media world, the world as event disappears and becomes a mere image, a spectacle and likewise a phantom. Also, the people who appear in the media world become images, phantom-like images and commodities.” Does really an event become an event because it is observed, because it is an image?
Finally in Zizek’s opinion one always lives under the gaze of others. Do we feel anxious in the absence of the gaze of an other? Is this why Jenni is exposing to herself to the others by using the camera? Maybe the game she is staging, the role taking indirectly takes place in the life of all others in a more indirect way who knows…


posted by whkc at 10:53 PM

ok so i just had this strange experience of reading the Burgin and peeking at annacam and jennicam and then watching a screening of GATTACA and being overwhelmed by this idea of “going back to the womb” as well as the struggle toward (away from) autonomous self-identity that grounds it. i want to try to flesh out some of the associations that ensued as well as some of my most basic reactions to the idea of the webcam-“exhibitionist” argument.
first of all, Burgin denies the simple association of Jennifer Ringley’s installation of a webcam in her room with exhibitionism. If we are to make this claim, we imply that we are peering through a “window” (via the camera/remote window on the computer screen), a notion which “privilege(s) our own point of view” and implicates us as complicit voyeurs (80). Burgin goes on to suggest the possibility that the camera is rather a mirror for “Jenni,” a mother’s gaze that “functions to subject the subject, to put the subject in its place” (81). He goes on to suggest that “the infant ‘takes place’ as a projection of his or her mother’s regard” (82).
what i thought was particularly interesting about the Burgin article was his concluding suggestion that Jennifer’s alleged “exhibitionism” was really just her positioning “Jenni” as a “transitional object”—something to cope with the loss of a prior life (tied to the maternal, familial) and an entrance into a new ‘differentiated’ one (adult, civilized). This transitional object, akin to a baby blanket in it’s power to comfort, will therefore become meaningless to Jennifer when she no longer needs it.
In many ways, I saw the jennicam as a journal- expressive, confessive, performative, archival. I kept a journal all through middle school and my first years of high school and was no longer able to do this after a certain stage. I wonder, though, what would be the point at which “jenni” becomes jennifer and no longer needs this transitional object, why we care ( if she’s not an exhibitionist, does that mean we’re not voyeurs?), and what happens when this all gets tied into a market.
i haven’t even got to the GATTACA part, but i think this is getting to long and i have to run... maybe i'll elaborate later.
posted by Jackie at 9:09 PM