I found Frohne’s comments on intimacy as privilege and commodity most interesting. She writes “the more power and prominence a person embodies, the more he/she tends to conceal his/her private life. Precisely because today everyone potentially has access to the existence-generating medialization of one’s person, privacy has become the new privilege in post-capitalist society…” (272). Class privilege seems to converge with psychic privilege, where the rich and famous, already knowing they are known (and because of the ubiquity of tabloids and entertainment television, how they are known) can afford to be less known. Perhaps the reverse would shed light on how performance/fiction lingers for josh’s pseudo-celebs who never could distinguish between real and celebrity life and so never had the psychic capital that might have afforded them privacy, and its corollary of personal contentment.

Frohne continues “intimacy has become a commodity that no longer takes shape in the field of tension between collective and individual relationships, but rather an instrument of the subjects medialization that eliminates the criterion of shame and always has to renegotiated according to what has the best effect” and in “event-capitalism, everyone joins in with their own body” (ibid). For the monetarily/psychically deprived individual, intimacy can be used for “public” gain and so it will in some cases. If growing ones celebrity is no longer an issue (like for our superstars), intimacy does not need to be shared and can be a privately held commodity.

All this begs the question of if intimacy is a commodity how is it exchanged/circulated? How would webcams fit into this situation?

Also I don’t fully understand and have questions about much of the psychoanalytic readings. How does excess operate in scopic drives and visibility? What is the connection between desire and fear? And that’s just to begin…
posted by chr15 at 1:44 AM

I think what is, perhaps, one of the more interesting points of Zizek’s article comes in his discussion of blurred boundaries between fiction and reality. Referring to the “reality soap,” Big Brother, Zizek writes: the subjects/actors “act their roles in an artificialy [sic] secluded space, they act them ‘for real,’ so that, literally, fiction becomes indistinguishable from reality: subjects get involved in ‘real’ emotional conflicts… The distinction between real life and acted life is thus ‘deconstructed’: in a way, the two coincide, since people act their ‘real life’ itself, i.e., the literally play themselves in their screen roles…” (CTRL [Space], 226).

And when they return to “the ‘real’ outside,” you can bet this altered, performance-based approach to interaction/self-consciousness lingers (ibid, 226). I remember reading somewhere about former reality “stars” walking up and down streets in Hollywood with a strange displaced/detached look on their faces, vying for some sort of recognition. Like the bizarre string of pseudo-celebs who continuously pop up on shows like Surreal Life, or dating game circuits: Blind Date, Love Cruise, Pleasure Island.

What happens when the cameras go off? Does this blurred boundary remain? Are spectators affected as well?

Zizek, it seems, may be arguing the opposite in his discussion of fantasy being based on “the notion of ‘someone out there looking at us’… not a dream but the notion that ‘we are the objects in someone’s dream’” (ibid, 225). So media only serves as a reminder. As Zizek writes, “what if Big Brother was already here, as the (imagined) Gaze for whom I was doing things, whom I tried to impress, to seduce, even when I was alone?… In other words, what if, in our ‘real lives,’ we already play a certain role… we play ourselves? The welcome achievement of ‘Big Brother’ is to remind us of this uncanny fact” (ibid, 226).

While I find this point of Zizek’s intriguing, his discussion of sex as only “masturbation with a real partner,” as ultimately founded on the subject’s investment in his/her own “secret fantasies,” might be taking things a bit far. And what is he trying to do at the ending, when discussing how the televised destruction of 9/11 allowed spectators to “experience the falsity of ‘reality TV shows’” (ibid, 227)? “[W]e wanted to see it again and again,” Zizek claims, but was the repetition of imagery based on our desire? I’d rather blame it on the Media – same with the basket-brawl that took place last year between the pistons and pacers, and was shoved down our throats every half-hour for the following month. I didn’t want to see these images repeated, but on they went, “ad nauseam” (ibid, 226-7).

To return to the question of reality/fiction, I found it interesting to read about the concept of JenniCam: “This site is a look through the virtual windows into my home. I don't act, play for, or really even pay attention to the cameras. I don't put on a show for you. But by the same token, I don't censor the cameras... I cut nothing. The point is, it's not a "show". Do not expect to be entertained. I am interested in an experiment that involves real life. "Seven strangers picked to live in a house" paid for by MTV is not real life. Shows with hand-selected people living temporarily in buildings wired for surveillance, competing for popularity and cash, are not real life. What I do is not exactly "exciting" enough for television. What you'll see is my life, exactly as it would be whether or not there were cameras watching” (http://web.archive.org/web/20030415072729/jennicam.org/j2kr/concept.html).

This idea is, of course, directly contradicted by stills of Jenni taking off her shirt for the camera, posing in high heels and black stockings, etc: those occasional "shows" where performance bleeds through, denoting the affect of an ever-present, ever-recording camera. This is, of course, more visible on the other webcam sites, most notably Webwhores, where the entire basis revolves around address/performance (less-so, perhaps than Anacam, though this "24/7 art+life cam!" is certainly garnered toward performance, address, and entertainment.) But, as I think Screen Tests does a good job of demonstrating, the camera's affect on bodies before its gaze is not only to be seen in moments of blatant performance or direct address. Certainly the strange deer-in-headlight pose adopted by most of the subjects in Warhol's collection of film strips echoes questions of stasis, control, docile bodies, and disrupted behavior in front of a lens (that visible/unverifiable instrument of surveillance/publicity); but the moments that are more interesting to me, or perhaps more telling of discomfort/alteration before the camera, come when subjects glance off-screen, addressing people behind or beside the camera, laughing awkwardly sometimes or catching themselves mid-smile. Here, in the moments where blank stares break down and a nearly reciprocal gaze (between subject and spectator, or subject and camera) relents, all the awkwardness or (dis)pleasure experienced by the subjects become (literally) visible.

But do we "only exist insofar as [we are] looked at all the time" (CTRL [Space], 225)? Or, like Winnicott's version of the mirror stage, do we only see ourselves in the recognition of an other, in our "getting the mirror to notice and approve" (ibid, 230)? My anecdote about former reality stars on Hollywood might further this idea, but that occurs after pseudo-celebrity status has been attained.

What does Dean say about this?
posted by josh_g at 10:20 PM