[-empyre-] Week 4: Lilly Irani, Shaka McGlotten, John Stadler, and Luke Stark

[John Stadler]

Hello, all:

I’m glad we broached the topic of porn compilation videos last week,
and I hope, Patrick, you’ll allow me to make that the focus of my post
this week (but also, yes, make it a whole empyre discussion unto
itself—I would love that!). The last time I participated in an
official capacity on empyre, it was around the question of “boredom”
and pornography, and whether boredom should be understood in this
context in its traditionally negative capacity or if it held other
potentialities or pleasures that could be interesting to pursue.

This week I am back on another pornographic kick. My post comes out of
a paper I’ve been writing (and which hopefully will turn into
something larger) on the gamification of pornography. There are a
number of ways that this overlap could be approached and has already
been written about, but my point of entry concerns an online series of
pornography that is (to me, humorously) titled “Cock Hero.”

“Cock Hero” is a series of compilation porn videos (I have only
encountered heterosexual versions), which borrow their gameplay from
the popular “Guitar Hero” games and dictates the user stroke his penis
(the question of whether this compilation video could be intended for
a female audience is, I think, not a silly question—despite the
series’ name—and one I can write about more should people be
interested in this question) to the beat of the electronica that now
overdubs a long string of porn clips. To facilitate this reception,
these compilations make rudimentary use of the same visual grammar of
“Guitar Hero,” where highlighted “beats” in the center of the screen
signal the user to “stroke once.” The user’s penis becomes his
instrument (or joystick), and the act of engaging what one might
presume is (rightly?) a boring compilation gains another interesting
function: the denial of orgasm or continuation of pleasure without
discernible end. Obviously, this gamification of pornography is rather
simplistic on some level. It operates on the "honors system" (no
apparatus makes sure the player is actually keeping up with the beats)
because it has no measurable feedback loop between the body and the
video (it's not quite at the level of some teledildonics), but its
conceit still intrigues me.

This online porn compilation series does not actually want to
facilitate orgasm (or its gameplay suggests that is actually the
antithesis of the series)—but crucially, it seeks to delay orgasm and
build a user’s stamina. In the reorientation of pornography as a
skill-based interaction that can be trained—perhaps even won—“Cock
Hero” strikingly refuses some of the central tenets that we think of
as nearly universal to pornography.

I am suggesting that the compulsive nature to this particular series
of pornography is not, at least wholly, the compilation form, but more
intriguingly is the overlaid game feature that this pornography adopts
as meta-language. The script of the game demands that compulsion be
the primary way of understanding its consumption as game: we are
trained by it to watch, to play, to refuse climax, and to compete with
others also playing it. But whereas the common wisdom would be that
pornography online already trains us in this manner, here we have the
act of browsing ironically stripped from our control, decided as it is
by the video's compilers. Nothing, of course, stops a user from
turning off a compilation video, or finding another one, but "Cock
Hero"'s gameplay suggests that compulsion may be one of the features
that pornography now aspires toward, rather than simply being
derogatory terms its naysayers levy at it.

Social media cultures have emerged around "Cock Hero" in the form of
message boards, too, and these become paratextual sites of pleasure
for this series, where users talk about the most recent versions of
the porno-cum-game, how well they did, what they want out of the
gaming experience, etc. What interests me here is the complicated
mixture of the affective and somatic, and the way that climax might
actually be the last thing that pornography ever wants from its users.

Or put otherwise, I am interested in pornography that on some level
advances its reception by delaying what we think of as pornography’s
raison d’etre: pleasure’s satiation. Of course, this can be explored
in any number of pornographic examples, but "Cock Hero" seems to me
especially fruitful for thinking about this topic. The question can
also be thought through interesting communities that have emerged
around the masturbatory reconceptualizations of “gooning” or “edging,”
where the point is not to climax, but rather to remain in a state of
near constant arousal, without fulfillment.

So those are some preliminary observations I’ve been thinking about in
regards to pornography's compulsion, and I’m sure I’ll have more to
say later on. I've enjoyed reading the posts this month and look
forward to hearing what the other participants this week are working
on.

Cheers,

John

On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 11:27 AM, Patrick Keilty <p.keilty at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thank you all for a great discussion last week. I hope to respond more to your thought provoking comments when I get a chance. Meanwhile, welcome to Week 4! I am pleased to introduce guest discussants Lilly Irani (US), Shaka McGlotten (US/ DE), John Stadler (US), and Luke Stark (CA/ US).
>
> Lilly Irani is an Assistant Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. Her work examines and intervenes in the cultural politics of high tech work. She is currently writing a book on cultural politics of innovation and development in transnational India, entitled Entrepreneurial Citizenship: Innovators and their Others in Indian Development. She is also the co-founder and maintainer of digital labor activism tool Turkopticon.  She has published her work at New Media & Society, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Science, Technology & Human Values, as well as at SIGCHI and CSCW. Her work has also been covered in The Nation, The Huffington Post, andNPR. Previously, she spent four years as a User Experience Designer at Google. She has a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science, both from Stanford University and a PhD from UC Irvine in Informatics.
>
> Shaka McGlotten is Associate Professor of media|society|&the arts at Purchase College-SUNY. He is an artist and anthropologist who works on digital cultures and screen media. His writing on race, sex, and technology appear in journals and anthologies. He is the author of Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality and co-editor of Black Genders and Sexualities, as well as Zombie Sexuality.
>
> John Stadler is a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University. He is currently writing his dissertation, titled “Pornography and the Everyday,” which tracks how pornography’s saturation into everyday life has altered the manner in which pleasure is produced, received, and spoken of. His recent articles have appeared in Jump Cut and Art and Documentation.
>
> Luke Stark is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University under the supervision of Helen Nissenbaum. Hid dissertation project, “That Signal Feeling: Emotion and Interaction Design from Smartphones to the ‘Anxious Seat,’” explores how psychological tools and techniques have been built into the interaction design of the mobile digital device we use on a daily basis through a genealogy of human mood tracking from the 19th century to the present. Focusing on affect and emotion, his broader scholarship explores the changing nature of human subjectivity in the computational age. Some of his other projects examine the links between emotion and online privacy; the connection between values and design in digital information systems and coding/hacker/maker practice; everyday affect, user experience design, and the "on-command" economy; and the cultural and political potential of emoticons and emoji. He is currently in the preliminary stages of developing his second major project, a history of what I call "visceral data."
>
>
> Patrick Keilty
> Assistant Professor
> Faculty of Information
> Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
> University of Toronto
>
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