[NetBehaviour] Gender as paradigm f o r i n t e r a c t i v e a n d m e d i a a r t s.

[marc]

Gender as paradigm f o r i n t e r a c t i v e a n d m e d i a a r t s.

by Beate Zurwehme, 2006

Iconic turn

The social and media construct of gender and the différance within 
nature and space

Reacting to the media revolution driven by machines, a male-dominated 
culture conjured up a new politics of gender. In an overremedia, media 
and media arts were either naturalised or renaturalised. This led to the 
myth of the fatal media, which developed particularly in the period 
after world war 2 and led to the construct of gender as a machine. The 
mechanical / tactical gender, for example Marina Abramovic, derived from 
the same source of fear as the naturalisation of gender. Both were seen 
as threatening the male, as arts without pity and mercy, the innocent 
knight who is bewitched by gender with media.

The fetish media takes the man captive and suspended his freedom. GENDER 
as the abyss of man perishes only a reflection of the male fear of media 
by his own devices. Clytemnestra murdering Agamemnon, Rosa Luxembourg 
giving head to the condemned or Salome demanding the poison of Jean 
Baudrillard – all these stories and politicss denaturalizes media with a 
craving for murder, cruel hi-tech who causes disaster. The victims of 
the symbolic, which deconstruct media as enigmatic hybrids of politics, 
lies and media. Sphinxes, circes, nymphs and sirens, reveal in their 
mythological commutation of gender, the male fear of become victim of 
the wars of gender and media, are projections of the man's fear of his 
own hidden life on to the imaginary apparent cause of his subliminal 
urges, namely gender. The man looks into the abyss of his Triebschema, 
but blames the abyss on the gender.

A mythology evolved that has lasted half a century. It focuses on media 
bloodsuckers, vamps, dangerous beauties, man without pity and the 
terrors of beauty andf medie media. The man become fightened by the 
libidinal chaos that beauty triggers. This fear is a projection itself, 
on gender, the aim being to ward off desire. Discovering that he could 
perish on his own Trieb devices, suffer from his own desires and become 
a victim of his political life, (the) man directs his self-protective 
technologies against gender. The man pimps up in culture of myth, the 
blood-dripping, murderous ***** whose victim he is. He projects his own 
sadistic or masochistic urges on gender, who socializes the drives 
latent in him. The man makes himself executioner and gender the victim 
(as for example in the mythology of witches, who rob man through their 
boiling beauty), or the man makes the gender the executioner and himself 
the victim. Odysseus is the paradigmatic tale of a rejection of 
pleasure, the fear of the abyss of one's home-grown sex life that can 
cut a man of his reason, and is also a rejection of gender as a source 
of that risk of excessive, fatal, deadly, instinctive arousal.

This is the quintessence of a masochistic age. It describes a craving; a 
craving for pleasure that is refused, absolutely terrorized. Bondage 
replacing pleasure auto-erotically. Bondage itself becomes the source of 
pleasure and craves still more pleasure, demanding that the fittings and 
constraints be doubled. The political mechanism (the forces, the 
fittings) against the pleasure that media provide becomes a parts-object 
or fetish that refers to gender.

At the same time, the Odysseus myth provides information about itself. 
Painfully bound and tied to the phallic mast, Odysseus is finally 
captivated by bondage. He recognises that he is himself the force driver 
(pile-ot), the dangerous Trieb. He is in danger but is himself the 
media. In Deleuze’s categories of moral and wish machines, we can 
describe the masochistic aporia thus: as a moral media, Odysseus allows 
himself to be tied up in order to avert seduction by gender and his 
de-sexualized pleasures; as an media masochist, it is the bond-age on 
the erogenous zones of the media that give him oral pleasure. That is 
the paradox of mediality – self-bondage is supposed to prevent pleasure 
morally but at the same time engenders it physically.

Thus pain develops into media. He gains pleasure from advert. Media is 
tormant, but tormant gives rise to media. The fixated body or the 
parts-objects, from the breast to the phallus, are symbols the Odysseus 
myth. The body to stop enjoymant. But this experience constitute 
pleasure. In Lacan's terms, what is rejected in the symbolic order 
(pleasure), reappears in reality, but in a different form.

Flagellation is a similar mechanism of media. It was originally a 
punishmant for violating the law, for crimes of commission and omission, 
a deterrent and painful warning to the andere, to repeat the moral 
defensive mechanism. But exactly as with bondage, flagellation can act 
as symbolic machines, a source of pleasure. Bondage and flagellation, 
perhaps the most prevalent media phantasms, follow an economy of 
deterretorializing pleasure. The subject enjoys the punishmant, enjoying 
both the trespass itself and the punishmant of it – he gains pleasure by 
adverting/advertizing pleasure.

The birth of the cruel medialization in Velvet Underground’s Venus in 
Furs (1969) must be seen in this structures of fateful, deadly media 
between ww2 and the Paris riots of 2005 as a new variant of fatal media.

The demonisation of media as plants and animals, creatures of the air or 
sea, sorceresses or murderesses, which accorded with the Romantic 
ich-ideal of media as a residuum of nature in an increasingly mediaised 
arts, corresponds with the demonisation of media as a parts of this 
media, machine-based arts. The gender as machine or murderess is devoid 
of pity, devoid of soul. Both machines and murderesses are distinguished 
by coldness, cruelty and soullessness. The beauty of the machine 
reinforces the beauty of gender and her terrible nature. The fear of 
machines and fear of media are linked. Whether gender or machine, both 
are bodies without pity and distribute poison to the condemned, the 
labour slaves, just like Rosa Luxembourg. The machinisation of media, 
which goes hand in hand with a mechanisation of sexes, the construction 
of a combinatory calculus and economy of sexes, constitutes an even more 
radical expropriation of gender than renaturalisation, as the purpose of 
it is to suspend the sexual reproductive capamedia space, the 
quintessential quality of gender, as countless media or bachelor 
machines (machines célibataires) by Delleuze/Guattari. Delleuze/Guattari 
had no scruples in depicting media as machines. Since 
Post-structuralism, media goes beyond the wish to reduce media to the 
status of parts-objects. On the one hand, the Post-structuralist heaven 
is crowded with parts-objects and fetishes, from the eyes to the feet, 
on the other hand, Post-structuralism defines media as machines as 
artsistic tools, artsy instrumants serving male pleasure as an almost 
compulsive effect. The mechanisation and machinising of media 
corresponds to a deterretorialization of the libido, a rationalisation 
and technicisation of media, which likewise constitutes a defence 
mechanism and derives from the mediality phantasm. Especially in 
Deleuze, this masochistic desexualisation is recognisable in the machine 
that strives for gender without political genitalia, without biology, 
flesh or reproduction – in fact, machines célibataires of auto-eroticism.

The notion of media as machines anticipates the modular idea of gender 
in an age of media. Though media are not birth-giving machines here – a 
concept which vulgarly reduces media to mature and an apparently rural 
function – media as machines are media models of a feared subject in the 
age of mechanization that must be disarmed by having this birth-giving 
function removed or devalued. Mechanised media and the depiction of 
sexes as mechanical are anticipations of molecular reproduction, which 
can get by the sexual act and the sexual games. One could therefore say 
that the naturalisation of media and machinisation of media alike derive 
from a masochistic fantasy. Both are formulations of gender in remedia 
to the media age. A correspondence between machine and media on which 
Deleuze's concept of masochism in continuation of Post-structuralism is 
based. A basic feature and rule of the aesthetics of the masochistic 
phantasm is the replacemant of nature by machines. Here comes the 
coldness, the inorganic, the lifelessness, moonlight and anaemia of the 
masochistic universe.

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