[-empyre-] Welcome to May: Boredom: Labor, Use and Time

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

Ben, John, thank you. Your responses move in multiple directions eliciting,
for me, at least as many questions as they give answers. Let me try to
tackle a few of them:

"At this time I consider mind wandering and day dreaming to be the same
process. As for the second question, if day dreaming / mind wandering is
the spontaneous generation of internal simulations informed by
predictive models of reality, then the simulation can never be a
surprise because it's the result of a prediction (at some level of
abstraction)."
Ben, on what basis are you assuming daydreaming is (always?) "informed by
predictive models of reality." What makes you say that? The assumption
seems arbitrary (or an apriori assumption) to me. One may as well argue
that daydreaming is a mental act that tries to escape predictive behavior
or task driven behavior. In that way, in daydreaming the mind is never
bored. Boredom sets in when daydreaming ceases. May not daydreaming be an
alternate mode of focus, the mind's rebellion so to speak, contra
"organized" stimuli?

"Now, this is arousal (as defined in my other
message) and even the boring could still be terrifying (e.g. just
because you know you are about to be murdered does not necessarily
remove the terror of being murdered.)"

Yes, the terror of being murdered is not removed; but I don't think one is
bored at that moment.

John, watching pornography a question has bugged me for a long time. In
most heterosexual pornography on line, the sound is dubbed. The voice of a
woman moaning is looped while the physical act is going on. It is obvious
that the moaning sounds are ceaseless and monotone and have no relation in
gestures and movement to the specific moment of the act one is seeing. I
very often wondered, is the viewer unaware that the whole thing is an act?
The producers of the film don't seem to care. Often, there is not even an
attempt at verisimilitude.

To say that most viewers are stupid or deluded or that pornography in our
days is mechanized, ritualized, etc., is not a satisfactory answer to me. I
ask myself the question, in a pornographic movie, what is the viewer
watching? Is he/she watching the acts (or listening to the sounds, etc) on
the screen or is it something else? Something else (maybe in the viewer's
psyche) for which the smut film acts as a reflector--maybe a "forbidden"
(therefore "unchic") act. That may be why pornographic genres on the
internet have proliferated: fat, skinny, anal, inter-racial, mothers,
brothers and sisters, grannies, etc., etc., etc. Maybe, pornography becomes
boring when it ceases to be transgressive. Transgression (modern word for
sin) is what is *expected*.

John, I think you brought in the idea of "amateur" porno. Hasn't amateur
porno itself become one of the pornographic genres, its transgressive
fantasy being watching voyeuristically a "sincere," private act. Aren'tt
most of amateur porno films on line also set up jobs?

Assuming a number of amateur porno films are truly, authentically so, then,
to me, the interesting questions become: first, why have the acting parties
decided to tape/film their acts? Emotionally, what induced them to do so
(money can not be the reason because then it would not be amateur). Second,
after filming the act, why did they decide to air it to be seen by others?
These two steps are different and may not have the same motivation. Many
amateur tapers, I assume, do not take the second step.

Ciao,
Murat

On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 1:34 PM, John Stadler <john.paul.stadler at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hi Emilie, Murat, Ben, everyone!
>
> Emilie, I think you are right to note the continuity between the
> boredom of modern pornographic cam shows and the narrative that
> animates "Deep Throat" except that in DT, it is a problem that the
> narrative seeks to resolve very straightforwardly. She has to go on a
> quest (a sex quest!). It becomes the problem to be solved, and it is
> resolved when the sex therapist finds Lovelace's clitoris is magically
> located in her throat, and one can imagine what then happens for the
> remainder of the film. Within cam shows, the boredom is not really
> spoken of as much as it is experienced. It might function like a
> problem to be solved, but it's often the awaiting of enough money,
> tokens, viewers, etc. to make the sex act itself worth the performer's
> while. So it is oddly a question of value. Boredom has become woven
> into the script of some kinds of pornography, and the way I'm arguing,
> is not so much a problem as an interlude or rest or form of
> anticipation.
>
> You also write, Emilie:
>
> > Rather than viewing pleasure as antithetical to the boring I'm
> considering the interesting as the not boring. The interesting can be
> engaging without necessarily being pleasurable, such as challenging
> intellectual pursuits.
>
> I think this is a helpful manner of parsing out distinctions between
> what boredom's antithesis is. I'm always very interested in the
> etymological arrival of words (or their popularization), so that's
> indeed a really interesting co-arrival. Thanks for bringing it to our
> attention!
>
> Murat, you write:
>
> > In my view, the watcher of pornography escapes boredom through
> daydreaming, which escapes (though elicited and stirred by them) the
> repetitive, ritualized set sequences of pornographic acts. It seems to me
> it is in the interchange between the mind and charged (in what way?),
> mechanical acts that pornographic pleasure/excitement is created. Marquis
> de Sade's ritualized fantasies which at moments have the permutations of
> mathematics (both "algorithmic" and orgasmic) are examples of that.
>
> I can’t speak as much to mind-wandering or day-dreaming, because until
> this week’s conversation, these models have been off my radar as
> explanations for boredom. I’m thinking of boredom more as a self
> awareness of one’s alienation from the passing of time. But we should
> definitely push on this more in the coming weeks and see how many ways
> there are, ultimately, to account for boredom.
>
> The way you write of daydreaming is interesting, though, and reminds
> me that film studies is often caught up in the psychoanalytic language
> of identification / objectification as the primary way of
> understanding spectatorship. Thinking about Sade would be interesting,
> too, for the phenomenological differences that reading pornographic
> texts afford, versus watching pornographic films. I saw a really
> interesting presentation at SLSA last year that read Sade as a
> dictionary, and in many ways, argued for the boredom and
> interchangeability of his texts’ sex acts.
>
> Rather than the language of escape, I would probably say something
> like: the viewer of pornography integrates boredom into the production
> of pleasure, and this happens because boredom is not merely a negative
> feature that denies, but rather is a productive component that sets up
> the task of finding its own erasure. I’m also very taken by Ben’s
> recent post that considers boredom as a possible reset button. If
> pornography habituates us, and habituates our reception of pleasure,
> boredom might well be a manner of disrupting the stimulus circuitry.
>
> Murat again:
>
> > When you say, "the non-event... authenticates... pornographies as
> genuine," are you implying something akin to what I am referring as escape?
>
> Let me try to clarify what I’m saying, because I’m not sure if it’s
> the same as what you’re writing about, but I want to understand your
> point better. I’m interested that boredom is almost exclusively seen
> as something we must strive to escape from, which then presents it as
> just a bad thing. When I write of authentication, it is largely in
> response to commercial pornography that has through time and
> repetition come to be viewed as fake or disingenuous. The pleasure of
> commercial pornography seems highly suspect, highly performative in a
> falsifying way (like on the level of the Brechtian alienation effect,
> but without the intentionality of the Brechtian alienation effect).
>
> Amateur pornography seeks to present real pleasure (whether it does is
> an open question), and one way that it authenticates its relationship
> to reality is by replicating the boredom of everyday. So a cam show
> that has a great deal of down-time is boring for the viewer and likely
> boring for the performer as s/he does effectively little (while
> awaiting tokens or the courage to perform sexual acts on camera), but
> the function of that boredom is to render the person real in a way
> that the glossy hypersexual performance of commercial pornography
> seems impossible of producing anymore. Commercial pornography seems
> like a fantasy in the most hyperbolic sense, whereas amateur
> pornography doesn’t necessarily do away with fantasy, but tries to
> render fantasy in a more believable manner. I guess what I’m saying is
> that boredom is a shorthand for reality, even if it’s highly mediated.
>
> Wow, I have a lot to think about now. This has been really productive
> for my project, and I hope it's been helpful for others, too. Thanks
> again, Renate, for the invitation to participate, and thanks Ben, for
> your really thorough and thoughtful responses, too!
>
> best,
>
> John
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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