surveilling the real state of emergency.

surveillance cameras cast their watchful eye upon the streets and subways of new york, weaving together the so-called emergency situation with everyday life. yet it seems that returning the recording gaze is prohibited, if not regulated. the nypd qua ‘petty sovereigns’ (a term dubbed by judith butler) suspends law through its discretionary (mis)interpretation. perhaps this securitization of the visual, in its differentiation of technologies of the gaze, implies that 9/11 and its state of emergency has not been left so far behind. rather, 9/11 is an event manifest in a variety of what m. m. bakhtin calls ‘chronotopes’, or materialized spatiotemporal dynamics; it organizes our experience in and of space and time through unpredictable and singular (because arbitrary) ways.

nonetheless, it would do good to ponder who may provisionally act as a petty sovereign. security counterintuitively reveals the weaknesses in the system it attempts to protect. recall ranciere’s description of the police message: ‘move along, there is nothing to be seen here.’ it is in that very nothing that everything is to be seen – the very shimmers of possibility illuminated within the cracks of the fragile policed order. putting surveillance itself within our focus, then, may provoke critical scrutiny of the supposed need for heightened security.

so when our gaze is centered on technologies of the gaze, we secure the opportunity to become petty sovereigns. in doing so, we may alter the trajectory of 9/11 and its organization of in/security chronotopes by heeding a lesson delivered by walter benjamin in the context of struggles against fascism: ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule. we must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency.’

militaro-capitalism.

what does the location of this military recruitment station, set in the heart of times square, say about possible interrelations between militarism and spectacular capitalism?

action! sex and the moving-image.

the second floor of the museum of sex is hosting an exhibit entitled ‘action! sex and the moving-image’ which traces the development of sex in film. spanning over a hundred years, sex in the moving-image underwent a variety of transformations mediated by regulatory codes and laws at different points in history.

the room of ‘action!’ was illuminated with a dark blue. tiny television screens adorned a wall in the room’s center and the surface of raised blocks functioned as screens for other video clips. the visibility and audibility of films with adult content and porn queered this curatorial space by rendering indistinguishable the public and private. brianne and i navigated this perverse space by viewing close-ups of blowjobs, anal sex, and the like with complete strangers. we strangely felt discomfort and allure at the same time and as the same sensation, in the time and space we shared with others. this queer intimacy in which not a word circulated amongst strangers while erotic sensations did brought together normally and normatively private matters into public spaces while leaving each experience irreducibly singular. a heterotopia to the dominant society of sexual control, ‘action!’ thus enacts a politics of sexual aesthetics reconfiguring the proper place of sex and the curatorial to queer the traffic of bodies walking through and stopping still in a proximity too close for comfort yet too far for commonality.

disciplinary flows, or what i learned from panda porn.

brianne and i happened upon a fascinating section of the museum of sex’s animal sex exhibit: ‘panda porn.’ because male pandas in captivity are unexposed to sexual activity and the fertility period of a panda lasts a mere three days, captors stage disciplinary interventions.

if we consider the body not as preformed material but, a la judith butler, a performed effect, then it becomes clear that the aim of this coercive viewing is not to simply act upon an already-formed panda-subject, but rather, attempts to constitute the panda as a sexual subject. eerily reminiscent of but implementing the obverse of disciplinary viewings within stanley kubrick’s rendition of ‘a clockwork orange,’ the coerced viewing of panda porn aims at forming the body of the male panda, the panda-as-sex.

the gaze enacted by what is viewed, then, summons forth a particular subject from a series of mobile performative forces. if the mode of address effects this act of interpellation, then perhaps we cannot only say that the screen is viewed by the panda; rather, the screen views the panda, views it into existence.

it becomes crucial, then, to consider the homologies between the captivity and formation of panda-subjects and the disciplinary structures of carceral arrangements producing prisoner-subjects.

we may also reflect upon the locus of carcerality itself: in what sense is society at large a prison? where and when are carceral qualities and their disciplinary effects ejaculated over the whole of the social?