[-empyre-] Starting the First Week / Valente and Ziyalan

[Alan Sondheim]

Times Square, sexuality, are always coded, at least in terms of ethology 
and municipal policies. We're primates, not living in an uncoded world, 
any more than any other species. And Times Square was coded in particular 
through city laws and boards of all types; it's just that the coding 
appeared like a release, more amenable.

Kristeva I think is good on this in her discussion of the abject as 
related to a zone of body/not body and its problematic, in Powers of 
Horror; that discussion is also relevant to these images. And aren't there 
issues (or are there?) related to the male gaze? Every photograph is also 
within and without technology? Digital photographs/reproductions _here_ 
for example, are doubly coded? We look online through tcip/ip and codecs 
...


On Wed, 2 Nov 2016, Mustafa Ziyalan wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Sexual pleasure has always been "codified or politicized or reduced to
> fit some contemporary theory" because the society at large was always
> threatened by it, to one degree or another, and in efforts to deal with
> its mostly perceived ramifications.
> In short, orgasm was always controlled. (Reich)
> So, "a space outside politics where sexual pleasure is not codified or
> politicized or reduced to fit some contemporary theory" strikes me as a
> utopia, a utopia in the sense of "be realistic and demand the impossible."
>
> That's why certain groups marginalized, in fact ostracized by society at
> large have striven to create such spaces.
>
> I am thinking of Times Square, before it was codified and reduced to
> some ersatz Disneyland. (Delany)
>