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?

embodying the city, or the urban corpus.

traveling through the city is an embodied experience that requires a corporeal rather than a merely cognitive knowledge. quick judgment lags behind conditioned reflex and somatic assessments. measuring the length of a road to be crossed, the distance between a crosswalk and a car, the speed of oncoming traffic, and the pace by which one must hurry to successfully jaywalk: precise calculations within microseconds.

the unavailability of a strictly cognitive mapping of city experience becomes readily apparent when taking the subway. hand bars are available for those less accustomed to the sudden jolts of accelerations and decelerations. but those who have literally incorporated the city’s temporal rhythms, its smooth running and short-circuits, are able to make the minor adjustments needed to accommodate the city’s frenetic and unpredictable activity. subways passengers stand without holding hand bars, even while focusing their brain activity within the material they read.

the city, then, can only be ‘understood’ as a sensorium to which the body adapts. but if the body cannot be thought apart from its experience of the urban landscapes. we should thus consider the ways cities form bodies as temporal and sensual subjects recalcitrant to subsumption under a particular explanatory paradigm.