Towards a pragmatics of sexual media/networking devices

For a long time, the disciplinary organization of knowledge within the humanities and social sciences relied upon a distinction between representation and practice, generating analytic techniques that hive off textual analysis and literary criticism from the empirical study of sociocultural practices and behaviour. While exceptions to this division of expertise abound, especially in the context of recent work on affect, materiality and objects within interdisciplinary fields such as science and technology studies, media and communications, and cultural studies, the distinction continues to provide a basis for discriminating between different strands of sexuality research. For example, pornography scholarship has largely emanated from departments of film studies, literature and media, at least in the USA, while the empirical analysis of sex ‘itself’ has conventionally been the province of sociology, anthropology and related social and behavioural disciplines. The permeation of digital media and networking devices into all manner of everyday life pushes at the limits of these analytic silos, revealing their inadequacies, while the immense popularity and sexual and social impacts of social media and geo-locative apps creates friction and problems for different analytic commitments – their preferences, prejudices and blind-spots – this, my contribution aims to think through and reformulate.

In his introduction to Porn Archives, Tim Dean remarks ‘now anyone with a phone and internet access may become a pornographer’ (2014: 6), observing how ‘ordinary people use their phones and personal computers to produce porn for the purposes of seduction, rather than commercial purposes’ (2014: 8). Given the scale and extent of transformations in the technological conditions in which pornography is produced, consumed, transmitted and its meanings effectuated, it would perhaps be difficult to avoid some mention of these circumstances. Dean’s comments are apposite and characteristically succinct in this regard, illustrating how technological innovations imbue old genres with new tricks, giving rise to new subjects, objects, facilities and communicative relations. On Dean’s account, phones and computers provide conditions for the emergence of new purposive functions for pornography, though little detailed analysis is offered of the sociotechnical settings within which such images circulate and acquire their affects, nor do the practical mechanisms through which seduction is achieved (or not) attract much analytic attention.

Meanwhile, in the burgeoning literature on online dating and sexual networking devices, it is by now commonplace to observe that online interactions are generally conducted with a view to arranging offline encounters. However, this presumed practical logic gives rise to frustrated critique characterized by a denigrating attitude towards the images and texts that constitute the mainstay of user interaction on these media. In an erudite critical analysis, Evangelos Tziallas (2015) disputes the commonly accepted wisdom that hookup apps are designed to facilitate offline encounters. Indeed, if seduction takes place, on Tziallas’s account it rarely involves the ‘soft, warm flesh’ of ‘real’ sexual encounters (2015: 761): more often it involves the seduction of consumers into a futile game of erotic play by commercial operators, the dynamics of which consist principally in never-ending exchange of self-made sexually explicit digital images – sexual selfies, if you will – in a process depicted essentially as duping and degrading its unwitting participants by turning them into frustrated self-pornographers.

With its careful attention to the dynamics of user interaction, Tziallas’ argument supplies some of the detail that lands outside the scope of Dean’s analysis. But Tziallas’ critique enacts a kind of semiotic reductionism that confines the functioning of sexual images to the status of mere signifiers, ‘cold, hard’ signs or ‘digital doppelgangers’ that largely fail to deliver on the access they claim to provide to the promised land – the ‘soft, warm flesh’ of the referent/signified (2015: 761). Tziallas is hardly alone in this assessment of sexual networking apps: indeed, his argument explicitly proceeds from and develops in sophisticated ways discourses of popular complaint that can be found almost everywhere today, from the pages of gay magazines and blogposts to recent music videos by Moby (Moby & the Void Pacific Choir, 2016) – in which social media, apps and smartphones emerge as distracting impediments to the authenticity of face-to-face sociality, technological commodities that isolate individuals and diminish opportunities for genuine social interaction. From the confines of this Frankfurt-style perspective, the digital exchange of self-pics can only emerge as a disappointing substitute for the ‘real deal’ – an inauthentic form of sociability, community, and sexuality, since all there is to see here are hollow signs whose representational parameters inevitably evoke lack: the deferral implicit in the absence of the referent. Such critiques rehearse and reactivate a series of modernist binaries – authentic/inauthentic; natural/artificial; real/virtual; subject/object; word/deed –distinctions that also happen to feature centrally in normative determinations of authentic intimacy, sociality, sex and community. On this basis, critical scholars of sex and technology have good reason to be suspicious of the valuing criteria this style of critique sets in motion within this arena.

What is missing from this approach to digital sex is any sense of the performative dynamics or affective intents of digital exchange; the sense in which online cruising and flirting might constitute distinctive forms of social interaction characterized by particular kinds of communicative activity that can be taken as new forms of social and sexual practice in their own right (Race, 2015, 2017). As Dean insists, people who broadcast their morning masturbation sessions to an audience of unknown others online ‘are engaged in a form of sexual activity that has yet to be accurately named or understood’ ¹ while using one’s phone to post sexually explicit self-pics online ‘needs to be recognised as a new sexual act’ rather than mere symptoms of a culture of exhibitionism (Dean, 2014: 8).

These intuitions can be developed further if we consider how digital media are involved in the emergence of new forms of literacy, articulation and mediated activity. When compared to the world of books and print, Gunther Kress (2003) has argued that the multimodal nature of digital media and interaction precipitated the emergence of a new form of literacy, in which the functions of writing and language move away from the ‘world narrated’, to the ‘world depicted and displayed’ (2003: 2). In this context, writing becomes a matter of ‘assembling according to designs’ (2003: 6), governed by prerogatives such as ‘fitness for present purpose’, an operation that seizes upon the ‘potentials for action’ afforded by the specificities of the technological apparatus (2003: 49). Though Kress does not use this terminology, I take his analysis to underline the distinctively performative character of communication on digital media, its capacity to enact relations rather than merely depict or erotically represent some underlying ‘real’ activity.

To be sure, the affective impacts of pornography are hardly news: the genre is dedicated to arousing and exciting its consumers by very definition. ² But digital devices supplement and infuse the denotative functions of ‘pornographic’ images with a range of distinctly social and communicative effects that connote a range of possibilities and proposals. The exchange of sexual self-pics on sexual media exemplifies how these aspects of digital display, identified by Kress, extend beyond the sphere of simple representation. On gay sexual networking devices it has become common over the last decade to encounter a particular sort of image, whether solicited or otherwise. Typically consisting of a high-angle close-up of a penis entering an anus with no condom in sight, it is the absence of the condom that emerges as significant in this context and confers the picture with its particular meaning and indicative possibilities. Typically sent without caption or further explanation, this figure or trope has come to operate as a discrete lexical unit that indicates a fairly precise sexual interest on the part of the sender: specifically, the desire to bareback. The communicative and indicative dimensions of this deployment of sexual imagery could be extended to the domain of selfies more generally, though whether dick pics would qualify as selfies is in itself an interesting question that I will refer for debate to the emerging field of selfie studies. Whatever the case, we can see how these missives aim to do something more than titillate the recipient: they communicate certain intentions with unambiguous indexicality: indeed, for participants with the appropriate literacy, no further explanation is necessary. Such messages serve to convey specific interests on the part of the sender, creating new affective climates and contexts for interaction in the process. In this sense, they might be taken to represent a form of phatic communication, which Malinowski defines as ‘a type of speech in which ties of union are created by the mere exchange of words’ (1923). ³

In the era of smartphones and hookup apps, pornography can no longer be confined to the straightforward production of sexual arousal through representational practices, (though this objective certainly remains significant). Rather, digital pictures have accrued additional functions in the interpersonal exchanges and self-publicizing activities that characterize communication on these media. The selfie of self-pornography becomes part of the grammar of sexual arrangement. In considering these examples, we are coming closer to the pragmatic dimensions of image exchange on sexual and social media, and the sense in which this practice should count as a sexual activity and form of social interaction in its own right. While undeniably important, representational criteria are clearly insufficient for grasping the significance and effectivity of these communications, in which semantic reference vies with another, pointed, important function that Paul Frosch terms ‘connective performance’ (2015: 1609). In other words these images function as gestural acts that seek to do things beyond the scope of referentiality and representation: they clarify intentions, specify interests, generate particular terms of exchange while setting out the social implications of subsequent connection; though they are just as likely to remain in the virtual realm of fantasy, or what I’ve called co-constructed erotic speculation (Race, 2015, 2017), which is no less social or interactive for that matter, since it produces certain (and uncertain) attachments. In Frosch’s neat terms, these image deployments brim with ‘incessant performativity’ (2015: 2607).

What’s the point of emphasizing the pragmatic functioning of these communicative units in addition to their representational operation? For a start, it directs our attention to the sociotechnical settings in which such items are mediated and exchanged, their formats prescribed and their circulation constrained in ways that confer them with their particular meaning and value. It further reveals how the connotative functions and technical affordances of digital interaction matter: they circumscribe and delimit possibilities of erotic and intimate play and interaction. In addition, a pragmatist approach might persuade us to situate sexual communication on digital media as a form of practical aesthetics, which is to understand it as a stylized activity ‘informed by and derived from practical, real-world encounters’, and ‘capable of being used or put into effect in a real situation’ (Bennett, 2012: 2). Situating the lexical items of digital chat as practical aesthetics enables us to conceive of them as interventions that always respond to particular events, problems, desires or situations, while amplifying, redirecting, deflecting or intensifying the impact of that situation/event/problem by imbuing it with personal meanings and associations that are then sent into (more or less) public circulation. In other words, these images are not mere representations of the sexual self or sexual practice, but forms of practical action that propel some version of the self into one or more of the various arenas of digital culture. On this basis, they can be situated as technical components of sexual media assemblages that solicit, process, collect, store, publicize and convey certain kinds of information, enabling their recipients to recalibrate their activities and respond on the basis of specific calculations.

Once the grammar of digital sex is grasped in pragmatic terms as a performative element in specifically assembled, multi-dimensional platforms, then all sorts of material objects and technical processes can be understood to enter into the labour of sexual self-formation (see Race, 2018). What once might have been read as a two-dimensional form of visual signification can now be grasped as a vehicle of self-articulation, a proposal or experiment that participates in the creation of new attachments, and a potential source of practical transformation.