Becoming Digital, Becoming Child: The Production of Pleasure in a Post-

Cinematic World

Diego Costa
University of Southern California, United States of America

Abstract:

This paper explores the relationship between the digital desiring subject of our
time and
his/her digital (sexual) gadgets as a fundamentally infantile and ritualized way of
managing the death drive. The paper recognizes the 21 st century as a post-
cinematic
era in which the subject's relationship to media coincides with his/her
relationship to
desire: perennial/y excessive, marred by anxiety, and difficult to articulate. It
also
suggests, through a close reading of the movement of images in online sexual
economies that despite the widely available technology of moving images, the
digital
subject chooses the still image as a mode of representation over the too-revealing
movement of the moving image in his/her transactions of desir -- which may or may
not
amount to a physical encounter, though it certainly produces endless, and endless/y
deferred, impressions of its possibility. Like a masturbatory prosthesis capable of
turning
the supposed continuity of time (in which each instant dies to give way to the
next) into
the circular repetition of the neurotic (in which each time feels like the rst
time), the
digital serves as world-making device for the subject to stage old modes of being
that
feel very new, and newer at each repetition. The still image traps or seizes that
which
the moving image lets out or leaks much in the same way the notion of the category
contains, or maims, the chaotic/oceanic/excessive queerness of Desire.

Keywords: Sexuality, Internet, New Media, Queer, Gay

Cruising Compulsion, Digital Perversion and Other Post-Cinematic Devices

We dont believe that truth remains truth

after its been unveiled.
Nietzsche

sorry, the face killed it for me.

good123@gmail.com

Its safe, or rather, risky to acknowledge the 21st century as producing a post-
cinematic
Subject whose relationship to media coincides with his/her relationship to desire:
perennially
excessive, marred by anxiety, and difficult to articulate. A close reading of the
movement of
images in online sexual economies, a reading that is not only close by from within
(the researcher
is recognized as present and sexually implicated in the research), suggests that
despite the
widely available technology of moving images, the digital subject chooses the still
image as a
mode of self representation. The movement of choice is, rather, that which we can
recognize not
as the movement contained by the frame, but the movement around it. The too-
revealing
movement of the moving image in this Subjects transactions of desir -- which may
or may not
amount to a physical encounter, though it certainly produces endless, and endlessly
deferred,
impressions of its possibility is avoided in the name of the kind of movement we
can link to the

death drive. Like a masturbatory prosthesis capable of turning the supposed

continuity of time (in
which each instant dies to give way to the next) into the circular repetition of
the neurotic (in which
each time feels like the rst time), the digital serves here as world-making device
for the Subject
to stage old modes of being that feel very new, and newer at each repetition.
Clinging to the
safety of the still image, the Subject reveals, and exploits, its potential for
trapping or seizing that
which the moving image lets out or leaks in the same way the notion of the category
contains, or
maims, the chaotic/oceanic/excessive queerness of Desire. And, perhaps, in the way
Richter
argued for the anti-fascist properties of the human face (with its too-many
muscles, too-many
nuances, too-much latency for movement) in all of its un-catalogability:

(...) the truth of the face is revealed precisely when it does not remain what it
is. It
assumes its proper self most fully in the moment in which it is shifting toward
something
else, another face, another identity. This moment of the shift is the proper self
of the face.
The language of truth, as it is staged upon the scene of its face, is always
already
traversed by its other. (Richter, 2002:109)

No wonder, then, that even within a digital sexual economy of pledged bodies (Its
coming, its coming) that avoids the very movement that animates them into being
one would find
the consistent withholding of the human face even from the still images put forth.
The Subject
holds on to a faceless, still and fragmented version of the self whilst he (and
here we speak of a
particularly male, and queerably so, sexual economy) also make desperate demands to
see the
face of the Other. The demand for the face of the Other can only be compared, in
frequency and
intensity, to the demand for masculinity (in the Other), both contingent to a
pledged face and
masculinity of the self one the presumed guarantor of the other.

The difculty in distinguishing movement from stillness has been, of course, the
most
basic pre-condition for the cinematic to come to be. We can see a mirror-like
version of such
confusion, and its exploitation, in analogue or aimless cruising, when the Subject
moves around
in space like a calculating flneur, seeking for an efgy of a hermetic
(hetero-)masculinity that
could only last as such, convincingly, in darkness and in stillness. When such
cruising happens
through the digital apparatuses and interfaces, the Subjects movement becomes even
more
calculated, and exclusionary, Tim Dean argues, but less literalized, as the body is
lost to its
avatar, a much more hermetic effigy. (Dean, 2009).

What does cruising mean in this context?", my mother asks. And how to give her an
admittable version that doesnt expose the self, my self, as always implicated in
cruising-in-this
context? How to give her a version at all? What does cruising mean in this context?
Cruising
means...the movement of seeking someone to...to fuck you in the ass, to love you,
to hold you,
to slap you, to piss on you, to marry you, ad innitum.

I wasnt sure if I had added the ad infinitum" to refer to the seeking, or to the
possible
objects of the seeking. l was sure, however, of the Mothers condition as hysteric
and her son as
pervert. It was as though I was having all the sex, engaged in all the seeking (ad
infinitum) that
She wasnt. Like an inherited load of repressed fucking handed down to the child
most willing to
act out what had been renounced by the previous generation. Like the paying off of
some kind of
accrued libidinal debt. But, then, I wasnt so sure. She, the hysteric. l, the
pervert. The equation
seemed too clean, too probable. Too un-queer.

The combination of hysteria and perversion onto the same gure, or dynamic, may
appear as an oxymoronic one. The first has at times been read as the negative of
the latter in
simplified attempts at understanding the characters of psychoanalysis. If the
hysteric runs away
from the sexual, the pervert acts it out in an attempt to master it. Or so the
story goes. But a close
reading of the theoretical, clinical, and practical literature (the digital
cruising subject produces a
lot of writing) suggests that hysteria and perversion share several characteristics
and can
sometimes entangle themselves in ways that not only expose the limits of
categorization,
psychoanalytic and otherwise, but also point to the way in which psychopathologies
need
constant revisiting. We can argue that such revisiting is accounted for, and thus
simply
happens, as part of the psychoanalytic clinic, in situ. We can say it is borne out
of the very
psychoanalytic communication between the unconscious of the analysand and the
analysts. But,
the digital interventions in contemporary subjectivity formation may inaugurate a
systemic
opening that lends itself to new subjective positions, as well as new access routes
to the
unconscious.

The digital condition involves, after all, a repetitive and traumatic loss of the
body, or of a
body -- and with cruising, the infinite, and infinitely seductive, deferral of its
resurrection. Digital
cruising as a technology of/for jouissance, (re-)dramatizes the experiences of
alienation that,
according to Lacan, the child experiences even before he/she is born, as language
describes the
infants place in the world prior to birth, thus imposing a primordial split
between culture and
nature in the causality of being" (Ragland, 1994:118). After that, at age two, the
child will suffer a
second alienation experience, which Lacan calls a castration, as language cuts up
the body into
parts and organs through meaning, all potentially laden with the symbolic
investments inherited
from the parents (You have Uncle Josephs nose," Grandpas legs," or Auntie
Joans hot
blood"). Digital cruising as a device lends itself, if not demands, that the
subject inscribe on
various parts of the body, naming or designating (i.e., cutting up) the body",
(re)-making a(nother)
Subject for a(nother) Other. Here the work of the Subject in his re-construction is
to put this
alienating function, the carving of the body through meaning, to his own libidinal
profit based on
the assumption on what it is that the Other would like to see represented, and
would like to be
kept off frame (a hysterical move under the service of a perverse function, we
could say). Limbs
are cropped out of context and gain a generality, a blankness (when the face is
finally put forth it
is often a poker face), that allows for the whoever-Other to project the whatever-
fantasy that will
make for a rejection less likely as possible. A rejection is, after all, an
interruption too. Cruising
must stop, so it can re-start.

The fact that Lacan describes how objects, or things in the world, are inscribed
within a
place of lack, serves as the symbolic backbone for the digital cruising subjects
repetitive
experience of literally finding nothing behind, after, or beyond, the image(s). Or,
rather, nding
something that always turns out to be lacking (sufcient masculinity). The temporal
extension
between the fort and the da of this fort/da dynamic is precisely where this subject
lives. And while
the technologies of cruising have evolved to enable a compression of this chasm
between fort
and da to potential immediacy, it is rather significant that the subject works to
produce a delay (ad
innitum) between the pushing and the pulling, and makes of this deferral the space
and time
of/for his jouissance. It is also worth noting that the extension of this spatio-
temporal chasm that
seeks to maintain cruising cruising has accompanied health technologies own
extension between
the contracting and the experiencing of the HIV virus (presumably the gravest
fallout to come out
of cruising). This technologically produced delay too becomes the time and space
(and condition)
of/for the subject(s jouissance).

The loss of the flesh is repetitive in its chain-like occurrence but also because
it harkens
back to much earlier ones. It happens in the name of the presumed Other(s Desire
-- for
masculinity) and is linked to the teasing of its repaired return: the digital cut-
outs, the image(s),
promise a Oneness in the flesh which always falls short. The Other, as the Self(a
Other, for the
Other), is never straight enough, (Hetero-)Masculinity is never accessed as body.
This is the
Lacanian dynamic of being at its most basic: The subjects desire is hooked,
lethally, to
jouissance, via the drive, whose primary goal is to eradicate loss without ever
quite accomplishing
it. For Lacan, there is no such thing as object fulfillment even if some
experiences and objects are
pleasurable. Drives, all of which are death drives in so far as they aim for a
kind of harmonious
constancy, aim for something more than pleasure." They aim to repeat the sense of
wholeness
that constituted them in the rst place (...)" (Ragland, 1994:107). Being itself
thus becomes a sort
of aimless cruising, the (hopefully) unending seeking of the object that will
restore the sense of
oneness he/she once had with the Mother (or thinks he/she had).

Such is the libidinal-subjective dynamic that the digital proposes in all of its
catalyzing,
enlarging and enhancing potential (a fantasmatic virtual fact, like that of a
partial object" in
Zizeks words): the dynamic of being-cum-cruising as a strategy to cope, and re-
cope (ad
ininitum), with loss through (repetitive) loss. Irresistible, seductive, familiar,
but also uncanny, as
Zizek analysis of a scene in Marcel Prousts The Guermantes Way" when the
narrator uses the
phone for the first time to call his grandmother and experiences a dreadful
separation, but also
her sweetness. Zizek quotes, (...) it seemed to me that the voice was crying to me
from depths
out of which one does not rise again, and l have known the anxiety that was one day
to wring my

heart when a voice should thus return (alone, and attached no longerto a body which
I was never
more to see)" (Zizek, 2011:154)

The eradication of the body, or the fleshly body of the other, from the libidinal-
subjective"
equation, to use Zizeks term, is thus one inherent to thinking, or dreaming, but
one that
technology, digital and not, renders increasingly practical, constant, and
necessary. The digital,
however, makes such eradication a constant, and constantly erotic, condition of the
contemporary
cruising subject. If Zizek asks what happens to the body when it is separated from
its voice,
when the voice is subtracted from the wholeness of the person", and answers it by
saying a
world out of joint", we can say that digital cruising makes of us, or our
structures, not a Hans
Bellmer doll-like anomaly, but turns such out-ofjointness, such queerness, as a
our condition
(again). If the telephone, for Zizek via Proust, takes the body out, leaving us a
de-contexted
voice, the digital in cruising takes the body and the voice out (despite our
technological abilities to
cruise with video, we cling to the stillness of the still image), offering us a
promise of a body, and
a voice, that will come later. Since the promise of this body, which will
materialize itself in all of it
perfect and life-saving flesh, has been around for a few years since the
popularization of digital
cruising technologies, this body and its subject have already aged. It has followed
a trajectory,
one whose mise-en-abyme layers may include both a line, or a vector, dotted with
repetitive
nodes that shoots forward (as though it meant to arrive somewhere), and one akin to
visual artist
Joseph DeLappes drawings Playing Unreal" (1998), and Work/Play.2" (2008)
(depicted below).
The rst recorded DeLappes mouse activity while playing the titular rst-person
shooter
computer game, and the latter mapped the artists mouse activity while in a six-
month residency
program. The dates of creation of the works, interestingly, mark an initial moment
of digital
cruising when photographic representation of the body was rare (on Gay.com in the
late 905 and
early 20005), making the fleshly body a somewhat necessary appearance for cruising
to go on
(the drawing goes back and forth but still resembles a forward-shooting line):

Image 1 - Joseph DeLappe, Playing Unreal(1998)

Image 2 - Joseph DeLappe, Work/Play.2 (2008)

These images also mark a second moment in digital cruising, when representations of
the body are so hyper-prevalent, the fleshly body can become the nuisance that
undoes cruising
as a masturbatory fantasy device, producing the kind of circular constancy we find
in Freuds
concept of the death drive, and the inertia of jouissance present in Lacans
denition of it. Ellie
Ragland describes the Lacanian death drive as the inertia ofjouissance which makes
a persons
love of his or her symptoms greater than any desire to change them." Lacan, unlike
Freud,
argued humans to be driven not toward death, but by it. Lacan follows Freud in
linking the death
drive to repetition but approximates it to reality, not pleasure, arguing that
reality is not benign,
but lethal." This lethality, it must be noted, doesnt necessarily involve the
biological body, but the
detritus of memories embedded in our flesh through family myths and archaic
traumas."
(Ragland, 1994:85). Its interesting to juxtapose these instances, the drive to
move (a movement
amounting to a movement qua movement) in 1998 versus the drive to circle (movement
amounting to stillness) in 2008, in the short history of digital cruising with how
Lacan queers the
Freudian death drive from its pleasure principle-versusreality principle binary
into a signifying
chain that begins with pleasure then turns into displeasure. Pleasure turns into
displeasure
because repetition ultimately refers to a preceding moment of loss (of pleasure).
Yet a kind of
pleasure remains in the repeating, as fixation, as trace, as memory, trying to
recuperate the lost
object, giving body to fantasy. Although the goal of repetition is to re-
experience a prior
satisfaction, the efforts to recapture such lost moments depends on the xations
put in place to
compensate for the loss of the primary object: that is, the illusion of a
primordial oneness between
child and mother" shattered by language (Ragland, 1994:94).

If digital cruisers naively bought the promise of a suturing and de-alienating re-
encounter
with the lost (m)other, they have by now learned, in the flesh, that it, the body,
will never
come/cum. And when it does, something is missing. Something is terribly missing. Is
this body
(the one it can interpellate, produce, and even see but not have -- again), cut-up,
de-contexted,
and re-arranged, a necessarily queer(red) body? Is it a perverts body made with
hysteric hands?
Is it the body by a pervert offered up to a hysteric? (Zizek, 2011:155)

The Driving Queerness of Desire: Cruising As (Still) Movement Around a Hole

We must consider that queerness itself involves a necessary eradication of a body,

as
well, as it repurposes and re-signier the naturalized body of the normative into
other functions --
necessarily. The naturalized body of the normative is, of course, a fantasy body
that, in its
translation from idealized image to body-in-the-world in practice also becomes
queer. And as it
does this, both normative and queer bodies (in this logic they are one and the same
once set in
motion) exposes the body tout court, as mere image, animated by whatever function
that we can
nd the resources to (re-)signify it with. The digital cruising subject, however,
appropriates and
reverses this botched translation/trajectory from idealized imagetic body to failed
queer body. The
dynamic now goes from the failed queer body repairing itself through the idealized
imagetic body
that the digital enables/proposes/demands, and back to the body-feII-short in the
flesh. The
naivite of the early digital cruising years have, however, given way to a much
saWier digital
cruiser who knows to keep the body in theory (ad infinitum), to keep the boy in the
taxi, so a
confrontation with lack (there where there is nothing) is avoided in the name of,
and through
jouissance. The best moment of love is no longer when the boy leaves in the taxi",
as Foucault
once put it, but when the boy remains there and never arrives. Over and over and
over again, as
if it were the same time. (Foucault, 1990297). The avoidance of pleasure becomes
the most
pleasurable thing about a pleasure that thus remains stuck in the Imaginary. The
best moment of
love is no longer when the boy leaves in the taxi", as Foucault once put it, but
when the boy
remains there and never arrives. Over and over and over again, as if it were the
same time.

As Lucien Isral put it, the pervert knows something about that where there is
nothing,"
he knows something of the female bodys enigmas. We may think of the vagina, but
also the
anus, as well as the symbolic nothing of lack which the body can merely, and ever
so (in-
)conveniently, represent, or render visible, as though it could contain it (Isral,
1996:98). The
pervert and the hysteric coincide in their auto-erotization. If the pervert
instrumentalizes the other
in order to avoid otherness altogether, which is only to be consumed as (literal)
object, the
hysteric seduces the other in a way as to forever delay fleshly contact with them.
We can think of
how the digital cruising gadget would come to engage with, excite, and Iiteralize,
their
masturbatory condition so successfully as it does in Win Wenders cinematic epic
Until The End
of The World (Win Wenders 1991), in which a personal device that displays ones
dreams turns
lovers away from each other and obsessively toward the personal dream-displaying
screen. All
they can see may be the dreams manifest content, but the latent content of the
dreamwork is,
clearly, at work, if not through articulated speech (as it may in the scene of
analysis), in the real
(of the body), producing a compulsion to (see ones) dream.

This supposed contradiction, a hysteric perversion or a perverse hysteria, which

digital
cruising seems to irt with, suggests the need for psychoanalysis to be deployed in
matters of the
digital if we are to seriously consider the Subject, but also to question whether
the digital doesnt
demand new psychoanalytic categories of psychopathology as it becomes such a
prevalent
structuring element in contemporary processes of subjectivation. Much has been
written about
the relationship between dreams and cinema. Can we imagine new modes of scholarship
that
acknowledge the effects of the traversing a media to produce the subject in ways
that go much
beyond the effects of a cinema of yore (a pre-postcinematic cinema) which seemed
to come, and
come about, as an apres-coup (for and of the Subject)?

I contend that an examination of Desire through the digital modes of sexual

cruising the
researcher can gain unprecedented access to the dynamics of human sexuation
(Penney, 2006)
and develop a new way for thinking out the chasm between sexual theory and sexual
practice
one which considers, or even centers around, the de facto sexual experiences of the
bodies-and-
pleasures imagined by Foucault, and, made theoretically possible, even probable, by
new media
technology. Digital cruising shares, then, a similar function that play and drawing
assume at a
childs psychoanalytic scene, and the dreamwork, the slip of the tongue, and the
inherently
betraying qualities of uttered speech in the adult analysands scene of analysis.

These new possibilities of animation for sexual fantasies and acts that the digital
opens
would seem to be a perverts dream device come to life: engagement with the sexual
through the
digital interfaces can produce all of the masturbatory repetitiveness, scripting,
and screening that
a pervert needs to produce and get caught in his symptoms. The steady
miniaturization and

privatization of the gadgets themselves also enable the digital cruiser to place
his world of
perversion with his non-perverse world in hyper-practical parallel lanes: cruising,
sexting,
consuming, producing, and sharing pornography can smoothly co-exist with the not-
so-sexual
quotidian tasks that impinge upon us.

Its important to distinguish perversion as the fundamental quality of Desire and

perversion as a psychic structure or psychoanalytic character. Perversion as the
very fabric and
condition of Desire, is, as Joan Copjec argues, a putatively universal non-
coincidence between all
subjects and their statements, the democratic opacity, anti-normativity and
unverifiability of
Desire (Penney, 2006). Its the inevitable trajectory of failure between libidinal
investment and the
object, whereas perversion as a psychic structure is the one responsible for the
attempts at
coding/crafting/trapping and accounting for the object before it comes along. The
net of
determinants was spread out far enough to catch the prey in any case," as Freud put
it (Freud,
2012:89). But if the digital cruising gadgets of today can welcome, and even incite
the perversion
of Desire, its queerness (invoking its theoretical possibilities and precipitating
the inherent
queerness of its practice), to become fuel for perversion as a psychic code
(Perverse familiarity
is entirely objective and programmatic"), why does this digital cruiser of which we
speak seem so
hesitant about acting out his rhetoric? (Bollas, 2000:170) Why is he so invested in
keeping the
masturbatory from becoming contact, or intercourse? (Bollas, 2000:18). Anyone who
has
engaged intensely in digital sexual cruising today has likely noticed the
investment in keeping
cruising going, never stopping, trumping any practical plans for an actual meeting
of bodies, the
fantasy having to just go ahead and become actual, to take place, shape, and body-
in-the-real.

If it is so possible at last, to cruise unscathed, to move (qua not-move) safely

away from
the frontlines of dark alleys and parks, why the retreat? Does the way of the
digital promise
perversion a haven, a safe space to cook up dangerous ideas, only to then make it
yearn for
good old hysteria in the raw?

There is a significant element of class inherent to digital cruising, which

establishes those
who are able to host, and those who must travel. Ironically, those who must travel
(they dont live
by themselves, are perhaps married, or unable to risk the lack of discretion that
a particular
visitor may provoke) turn out to be the raw material that fuels the nonstop
cruising of the host. By
unscathed, then, I mean to say that one doesnt have to hang out at dark and shady
public places
for cruising, risking police harassment and being found out." This cruising, as a
novel fantasmatic
device, introduces new cruising subjects who may never have taken to cruising (from
theory to
practice) had this technology not been available, and, well, a host of new
possibilities for subjects
who may have cruised anyway to hone the cruising skills for which the any-cruising
would already
have been a symptom in the first place. The fact that, unlike Tim Dean suggests (as
he seems to
focus on the cruising of self-identied gay men), digital cruising can be aimless
(a straight-
identified male may now very well simply happen across, say, transsexual porn) and
as such,
queer objects may hit normatively intentioned subjects by surprise a perverts
worst nightmare.

If perversion is the condition of Desire, the human condition, hysteria is the pre-
condition
of analysis. Hysterics are the true inventors of psychoanalysis, as Nestor
Braunstein reminds us.
The structure of hysteria is the condition for any speaking being, no matter his or
her clinical
structure, to enter analysis. The discourse of hysteria is the formula of the
analytic scene: There
must be a complaint, a symptom, transformed in a demand to know which hides itself
in an
unconditional demand for love addressed to the one who is supposed to know what we
ignore"
(Braunstein, 2005:202).

Unlike the object of the drive, which heads forward, and affect, which only
exists in the
present, the perverts fantasy object (the object of fantasy is always perverse) is
always expired,
obsolete, and out-ofdate (Isral, 1996:140-149). Akin to the contents of the
dream, it is in the
domain of the having-been, never in the future: corpses animating a finished
event" or a tomb of
his past desires" (Isral, 1996:46). The hysteric, however, is much more interested
in banking on
a bliss in the future, than succumbing to what Christopher Bollas calls the sexual
logic of
intercourse." For Bollas, intercourse appears as a disruptive key figure in the
three-year-old
childs sexual epiphany that, apart from Jesus (or the Holy Family), the child
did not enter
existence through maternal immaculate conception" (Notice how the three-yearolds
sexual
epiphany comes just after the child has his/her body out up by language and meaning
into organs
and limbs, ridding him/her further from Oneness with the (m)other. ). And that
instead of being the

center of the universe, the child may actually just be an after-effect of parental
sexual passion
sought after for its own sake." The crux of such narcissistic crisis represented by
the notion of the
intercourse, as opposed to some kind of divine alignment of the stars to produce
some kind of
child God, is the idea that the self may be mere fallout from an act that actually
wasnt meant to
be productive, but merely conducive. The disruption is one that takes the child
away from Desired
outcome, or raison dtre, to a barebacking accident (from cooked-up fantasy to
accidental
rawness), or friendly re (Bollas, 2000:169).

While the pervert produces a carefully coded closed eld to put his fantasy at
play, one
that involves a ready-made love without risks or surprises, the hysteric gives his
self as a
malleable perfect gift to the other, the master who can sculpt him as though he
were clay, or
loose limbs in the hands of a doll-maker. Braunstein calls it a sacrificial
offer," which the hysteric
follows with acts of scolding, accusation, self-pity, and violent complaints that
will only prove that
the Other is deceitful, that the deceit is in the Other. Then the hysteric will
move on to another
Other, who may seem worthy of his sacrifice, and may nally bring him plenitude
(Oneness?)
The hysteric is always awaiting the figure of the Ideal Father, beside whom
everyone else falls
short.

Its easy to read the hysteric(s) strategy of the sacricial offer in the dynamic
of gay
mens obsessive, and obsessively articulated, search for the perfectly and
completely masculine
Other in digital cruising. The chorus is omnipresent and, well, hysteric in its
drive to build a master
out of the Other only to unveil his inability to masterfully occupy such position.
No fems,
Masculine Only, Masc 4 Masc, Masculine for same and their various versions, can be
said to
form the very crux of the digital cruisers demand and complaint. An expression of
an ideal, the
Ideal Father immune of the femininity that taints, exposes and mirrors (lack),
simultaneously
stated with a horric (paranoid?) dread of a femininity that lurks and risks
surprising the self, and
exposing the chasm between his very tight and diligently composed fantasy object
script (a
ready-made) and the objects that he has actually found. The demand for an all-
encompassing
masculinity borrowed from the ready-made ideal of hetero-masculinity is
interpellated as
hysterically as the fear/knowledge that such figure is there to simply (cock-)block
the view of
Iiteralized lack: There where there is nothing.

What is most fascinating about this dynamic is how the demand seems part and parcel
of
the complaint; the desire hand-in-hand with its failure, perhaps even secondary to
it (a fetishist
would at least know to know, but still, and do away with this theatrics). The
producing is
entangled with its undoing, the obsessive (hysteric?) search for the fantasy
(always perverse)
object so consistently side-by-side (inhabiting the same ad, the very same
sentence) with its lack.
Is the digital cruiser as invested in the failure to find the object as he is in
the drive toward it? Is
that what it takes for the trajectory to be one that circles around the object
(cock-)blocking the
lack in order to avoid the direct (raw) sight of horror? Does he need to plant, or
announce, the
sign of femininity that will spoil it all, thus diverting the intercourse, and
exposing the virility (of the
Ideal Father) as imaginary a sham?

There is, after all, a relationship of mutual failure in the hysteric and his
objects too. He is
never perfect enough, the master is never master enough, and the jouissance that he
attempts to
cause in the other never quite echoes back at himself. And if the lack (of spotless
masculinity) is
pre-emptively produced/projected in the Other in digital cruising, this may
displace the selfs own
(history of) inadequate masculinity. The fantasy of sameness, masculine for
masculine, which is
so prevalent in the demands of online personal ads, makes the fantasy of an ideal
masculinity of
the self (which it presumes to be what the Other desires, in hysteric fashion)
contingent on the
ideal masculinity of the Other. In a kind of contract of ction (or xion), I
believe you are It, ifyou
believe I am It too, its as though the repetitiveness of such game, and the
expendability of the
Other, the entertaining the idea of an encounter or intercourse, provoked more
jouissance
because it doesnt need to ever stop (Ragland, 1994:140). An encounter, or
intercourse, is an
interruption. And it finishes. In sexual intercourse the hysterics sex object is
internal only, and
the sexual other is engaged as a masturbation partner who shall screen carnal
contents, which
verge on guided imaginings." (Bolas, 2000:166). Knowing the necessary chasm between
ideality
and actuality, of virility or otherwise, the selfs strategy is to bank on the
masculinity of the other
being a ruse before it even announces itself, to avoid being found out as a ruse
himself.

Bibliography

Books

BOLLAS, Christopher. Hysteria. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

DEAN, Tim. Unlimited intimacy: Reections on the Subculture of Barebacking. Chicago

and London: The
University of Chicago Press, 2009.

FOUCAULT, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: interviews and Other Writings,

1977-1984. New York and
London: Routledge, 1990.

FREUD, Sigmund Freud. Totem and Taboo. Empire Books, 2012.

ISRAEL, Lucien. La Jouissance de LHystrique. Paris: Editions Arcanes, 1996.

RAGLAND, Ellie. Essays On the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan. New York and
London:
Routledge, 1994.

Articles
ZIZEK, Slavoj Zizek - The Grandmothers Voice," Lacanian ink 38: There is No
Sexual Relation (2011).

Book Chapters

BRAUNSTEIN, Nestor - La Jouissance Dans LHystrie," in La Jouissance, Un Concept

Lacanien. Paris:
Eres, 2005.
PENNEY, James Penney - Concluding (Un)Queer Theoretical Postscript," in The World
ofPerversion:
Psychoanalysis and The impossible Absolute of Desire. SUNY Press, 2006.

RICHTER, Gerhard - Benjamins Face: Defacing Fascism," in Walter Benjamin and the
Corpus of
Autobiography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002.

Filmog raphy
Until The End of The World (1991). Dir. Win Wenders, Germany.