Sex Without Friction: the Limits of Multi-Mediated Human Subjectivity in Cheang Shu Lea’s Tech-Porn

 

 

 

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Fig. 1.

Scene from I.K.U. Human clone steps out into new world after opening activation scene. Depth perception is abandoned for surface cues.

© Eclectic DVD 2000.

 

Perhaps we still have a memory of sex, rather as water ‘remembers’ molecules no matter how diluted. But that is the whole point: this is only a molecular memory, the corpuscular memory of an earlier life, and not a memory of forms or singularities … So what we are left with is the simple imprint of a faceless sexuality infinitely watered down in a broth of politics, media and communications, and eventually manifested in the viral explosion of AIDS.
 

–Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil (1990)

But I saw at once something elongated and pale floating very close to the ladder. Before I could form a guess a faint flash of phosphorescent light, which seemed to issue suddenly from the naked body of a man, flickered in the sleeping water … With a gasp I saw revealed to my stare a pair of feet, the long legs, a broad livid back immersed right up to the neck in a greenish cadaverous glow … A headless corpse!
 

–Joseph Conrad, Secret Sharer (1910)

 
Cheang Shu Lea’s multimedia film I.K.U. (2000) is a sex-fest set in a future populated by sexually activated human clones and their male and female johns. Beginning in 2019, these replicant humans, or I.K.U. Coders, traverse the urban architectures of Tokyo to gain sexual experience for the projected mass production of sex pills. I.K.U. pills promise all the pleasures of sex without the physical friction. While the film introduces the Genom Corporation as the mega-institution that has engineered the clones, I.K.U. Coders go about their sex work without the materialization of any entity masterminding their rovings. Outside scenes of activation and deactivation and commands that flash sporadically onscreen, they seem fully automated and autonomous. As viewers, we follow the Coders as they mutate into seven different feminine forms, moving from one sexual scenario to another in urban locales like a freeway overpass, strip club, or sushi bar. While each sex scene occurs against a different local backdrop with a new type of sexual pairing, every scene repeats a cycle. Each begins with the introduction of the morphing Coder at work on the set and ends with a mosaic display of the Coder’s identification data and the amount of data collected in the just transpired sexual coupling. The overriding aim of these cyclical sexual settings is the accumulation of enough orgasmic data to download for the production of I.K.U. pills. The final product, however, never materializes outside a brief animated fantasy showing a vending machine selling sex pills. The entire film is a dream-series without narrative chain. And the enjoyment of viewing lies in watching the assorted contours of each sex segment, always quantified towards a fantastical target but never reaching it.
 
Cheang’s sci-fi porn feature is an unauthorized, unfaithful spin-off from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Blade Runner depicts a techno-saturated, nature-impoverished Los Angeles of 2019. The city’s hollows serve as hideouts for a group of genetically engineered human clones, called replicants, that return to Earth to confront their corporate makers after their expulsion from Earth. Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) is brought out of retirement to resume his role as a police agent (blade runner) who hunts down human clones. While attempting to exterminate the mutinous band of clones, Deckard falls in love with a more technologically advanced replicant by the name of Rachel. Cheang’s I.K.U. takes off where Blade Runner concludes, giving full “sexual” expression to the unconsummated erotic relationship between (supposedly) human and clone. I.K.U. echoes themes apparent in other visual pieces in Cheang’s repertoire. Taiwan-born queer digital nomad Cheang Shu Lea is known for her locally embedded, yet geographically elusive, film projects and net installations set in or at the waysides of Tokyo, New York, Taipei, and Paris. Her other feature films Fresh Kill (1994) and LoveMe2030 (2005), along with her cyber-installations Brandon (1998-9) and Milk (2004), share an attentiveness to media facilitated, racially marked sexual intimacies. In I.K.U. and other works, new information technologies and bodily mutability become the interchangeable tools and signs for the transnational dominance of commodity culture, corporate rule, and state-military bureaucracy.
 

 

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Fig. 2.

 
Scene from I.K.U. The film in digital video markets the story of its own completion, providing a direct “exterior” interface with viewers. Alongside these onscreen displays, a partial story “within” the film unfolds in non-linear segments.

© Eclectic DVD 2000.

 

 

Frame One: Tech-Porn

 
While Cheang’s I.K.U. is a pornographic tribute to the sexually ambidextrous body, the film could be more accurately described as tech-porn. The film is as much a celebration of the transferability of content across different mediums, as it is a pronouncement of liberation from biologically assigned sex. Before the first scene, opening credits have already taken viewers through a multimedia blitz that includes electronic grids, a sliding panel that reveals a woman and man having frantic sex, and video game consoles describing the I.K.U. pill/chip, to be produced and sold in tune with individualized preferences for simulated sexual experiences. By the conclusion of the first scene, I.K.U. has severed and reworked its relationship to whatever remains of film as a favored medium.
 
Cinema has been attributed with an enhanced capacity for realism, whether considering Hollywood narrative or its counterpoint in European auteurist film. The illusions of transparency and continuity in the Hollywood standard and what André Bazin identifies as “aesthetic ontology” in art house cinema all render the cinematic image a window into a re-imagined world.¹ In opposition, Third Cinema refuses both the illusionism of Hollywood and the aesthetic preoccupations of European auteur cinema in favor of a militant, often pedagogical ultra-realism that highlights the ideological workings of commercial and alternative independent film.² As a product of digital video, however, Cheang’s I.K.U. departs from realism altogether. At the closing of the first scene, the newly activated feminine I.K.U. Coder emerges as a superimposition of machine hologram and “live” human-clone body. Immediately following, an informational display identifying the version of the just activated Coder links viewers to a new scene. The images in the feature blend live components with computer generated imagery, making no claims to representation. And, geared towards the “net-surfing generation,” the images provide non-discrete segments that stream continuously through transitional links, rather than moving as a linear narrative through juxtaposed separate shots as in film montage.³
 
The digital image in I.K.U. tests the limits of what can be understood as an image. If the photographic and film image have been conceived as a visual mediation of reality that provides a re-imagined relationship to real objects in the world, the image becomes a visible screen rather than a transparent window in Cheang’s film.⁴ In the first scene in the elevator, viewers do not only watch the sexual activation of the I.K.U. Coder by an I.K.U. Runner, an agent of the Genom Corporation (cited as producer of the human-clone Coder). The Runner also speaks to us through a screen that becomes visible at the moment it is spoken to/through. Rather than providing a reflection of the real, the image becomes a screen that displays and transmits. In the segment following the scene of activation, the transformation of the image into an instrument for viewing and communication becomes even more visible. A different permutation of the originally activated Coder receives a command onscreen:
 

<your bio disk is now empty

take the New Tokyo subway line>

 
Sent on mission, the Coder, who is most accurately referenced by the pronoun “it,” gets on the subway and tests out its function through heavy petting with a subway passenger. It travels towards its destination, a strip club, where it receives the command to “dance. dance. dance.” At the club, the Coder has sex with a male john with other couplings happening all around. It racks up data points after it penetrates him and a female dancer with its morphed dildo-arm in a brief threesome. After the collection of orgasmic data, text flashes onscreen commending the Coder for a “good job” and directing it to the next location.
 
As shown by messages onscreen, the Coder acts autonomously but does so under direction and command. It is an automated instrument that seeks out and collects sexual experiences. The Coder’s morphing and moving body is the focal point of the image for viewers. But it is also the screen that displays, stores, and transmits each sexual transaction as information. As viewers, we are placed at the intercepting point of the image-screen that is the Coder. We watch, receive, and send images and information. Shot and edited using digital media, Cheang’s I.K.U. attests to the media convergence enabled by the computer and the Internet. Anne Friedberg contends that the inter-permeation of cinematic, televisual, computer, and telephone mediums and displays offers a new visual episteme. And according to Lisa Nakamura, the transformation of the Internet from a textual to graphic base and its fusion with video and television has contributed to the incorporation of the Internet into everyday life in the “post-Internet” era. Cheang’s multimedia film exploits the non-representational, non-linear, streaming possibilities enabled by digitalization to create a cyber-world of mutating bodies, sexual scenes that loop back or link up with slight deviations, and a broader network that transmits, receives, and stores data. Beyond utilizing the technological capacities of digital media, I.K.U. incorporates the loss of media specificity into its partial storylines. Media machines including television sets, cell phones, military goggles, 3-D projections, video cameras, and surveillance cams appear as mere props for the smooth transfer of images and information.
 
Cheang’s I.K.U. is a film in name only. It evokes film-like elements through story segments and images that provide something like content.⁵ But these semblances of film serve only to signal film’s demise with a digitally induced media convergence. The “death” of film at the hands of new media has initiated grieving for film’s lost specificity as a medium and disciplinary object.⁶ For instance, emphasizing existential and phenomenological approaches to media, Sobchack argues that electronic “presence” puts the lived-body in crisis (“Scene” 82). Bodily dimensions become mere “kinesthetic gestures describing and lighting on the surface of the screen” (81). Sobchack makes this claim based on a comparison to cinema’s ability to move beyond its technological “thing”-ness (referencing Heidegger) to present a representation of the objective world. The cinematic spectator experiences this presentation of a representation of the world semiotically as both subjective (spectator shares in presentation and representation of experience) and intentional (automated flow of experiences beyond control and containment). Electronic technology replaces cinema’s centered, subjective spatio-temporal relationship with the world with the dispersed, insubstantial transmission of world and self across a network.
 
In contrast to Sobchack’s mournful perspective, Lev Manovich views new media as the realization of cinema’s full potential. Cinema’s dream of producing a universal language has been fulfilled by the computer’s ability to remake the spectator into a user. The computer user not only understands but also speaks the language of the medium. Also, computer generated imagery and spatial montage enable more fully autonomous representation, beyond human-centered perspective. Manovich identifies new media as the meeting of two separate historical trajectories: computing technologies, which deal with the calculation of numerical data; and media technologies, which enable the storage of images, image sequences, sound and text in different material forms. New media describes the computerization of modern media forms (cinema, photography, radio, television, print press) and the translation of their representational objects into numerical data, made accessible through computers for media distribution, exhibition, production, and storage. For example, binary code replaces the iconic language of cinema. Although new media redefines and supplants modern media technologies, it also activates a return to cinema’s origins, for instance in the return to the loop.⁷
 
Sobchack and Manovich seem to offer alternating accounts of the impact of digital media on cinema. The former declares cinema’s death and the latter insists on cinema’s continuous recursion in new media. Yet, despite their different approaches, both media scholars emphasize the structural role of media technologies in producing, or even determining, a relationship between spectator-user and autonomous representations of reality. Sobchack expresses concern over the dematerializing and objectifying effects of digitalization on spectator subjectivity. And Manovich celebrates the heightened agency of the digital-media user in participating in a less human-centered rendering of reality. In both cases, media technologies are presumed to mediate the production of spectator and user as forms of subjectivity.⁸
 

 

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Fig. 3.

Scene from I.K.U. Feeling of connectivity offered in parallel speeds, spatial proximity, and shared image of outstretched hand, linking motorcycle to scene in van.

© Eclectic DVD 2000.

 

 
In contrast, I.K.U.’s multiple media forms exceed what can be understood through the idea of technological mediation. The multiple screen-images that permeate the world of I.K.U. seem to offer diverse interfaces between viewers and the film. Displays that look like game consoles, computer windows, and mini-cam views invite viewers to interact with the images and information that appear onscreen. But the interactivity promised by screen-images in I.K.U. give viewer-users the impression of having either too much control or too little. Viewer-users are positioned as both commanding and commanded as we intercept communications. Moreover, aside from giving the look and feel of interactivity, the interfaces are non-functional. The instantaneous speed and infinite connectivity of a hyperlink on the Internet finds expression in the parallel movements of a moving van, carrying a man and woman having sex, and a scooter, carrying two Coders (see Fig. 3 above). Scooter and van travel next to each other on a highway, with an occasional projected image from the van appearing on the motor-helmets of the Coders on scooter. The projected image looks like an icon-pointer. Kinesthetic movement between vehicles and the icon-pointer image offer game and net interfaces between viewer-users and the multimedia film. Yet, these multimedia displays never deliver any actual interaction between viewer-users and media. Realizing Sobchack’s fears, viewer-users, along with the data collected by I.K.U. Coders, are transmitted as additional feed into some mainframe that surveils, collects, stores, and sends information and images. Nevertheless, the subjection of representations of humans in the film and viewer-users to an elusive technological master-entity provokes neither utopian nor dystopian sentiment in I.K.U.
 

Frame Two: Human Structure of Feeling

 
In Scott’s Blade Runner, the closing scene in the elevator with Deckard and Rachel re-brackets the question that has driven the sentiment of the film throughout, namely the question of whether the ability to experience emotions confers human status to the corporate engineered replicants. In Cheang’s I.K.U., this question never emerges. Although the Coder shows signs of pleasure during sexual activation, these signs are clearly part of an activation sequence. The sequence includes being fed lines, like “Say ‘kiss me'” and “I want you,” that the Coder then repeats back to an agent programmer (I.K.U. Runner) of the Genom Corporation.
 
The Coder’s instrumental status as the product of genetic engineering and intravenously fed codes challenges David Harvey’s reading of postmodern affect in Blade Runner. In The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey states:
 

Blade Runner is a science fiction parable in which postmodernist themes, set in a context of flexible accumulation and time-space compression, are explored with all the imaginary power that the cinema can command. The conflict is between people living on different time scales, and seeing and experiencing the world very differently as a result. The replicants have no real history, but can perhaps manufacture one; history for everyone has become reduced to the evidence of the photograph.… The depressing side of the film is precisely that, in the end, the difference between the replicant and the human becomes so unrecognizable that they can indeed fall in love (once both get on the same time scale).
 

(313)

As in many other cyberpunk science fiction films, Blade Runner introduces the ethical puzzle of dehumanization in the face of an ethereal capitalism that has imploded differences in space, time, and meaning in what Harvey calls “chaos of signs.” Technological advancement releases humans from the brute exploitation and error of human economic production and biological reproduction. Yet, the specter of exploitation and unpredictability returns with greater force with the unrestrained use of genetically engineered human clones. According to Harvey, in Blade Runner, the activities (manual, militia, sex, etc.) performed by the replicants come under question as forms of exploitation particularly when the replicants become humanized through the expression of feeling. In the case of Rachel, her longing for a family of origin and authentic human status gains Deckard’s sympathy and desire (313-4). Roy, leader of the replicant rebellion, narrates his experiences as an outsourced laborer with a mixture of anger and fascination. In Harvey’s reading of the film, the feelings of loss and longing conveyed by the replicants place them outside the speed of global capital and, however momentarily, on the same scale of time and space with humans.

 
Even more than the “structure of feeling” Harvey attributes to the aesthetics of decay fragmenting the post-industrial city, the structure of feeling he identifies in the replicants enables a tracing of the “hidden organizing power” of the Tyrell Corporation’s techno-dictatorship. For Harvey, Rachel and Roy subject themselves to the Freudian symbolic order that constitutes human social relations in their longing to be fully human. Rachel submits to Deckard’s desire and Roy to his maker. In both instances, desire brings grids of power into visibility and clone closer to human. In the last count, however, what fuels Harvey’s attention to the replicant’s approximation of the human is the desire to see a structure of feeling reignited in the human subjects of the film. As the mastermind behind the Tyrell Corporation states, replicants are more human than humans. They display all the trappings of humanness when real humans have lost all connection to these trappings. As Harvey suggests, the replicants of Blade Runner serve as signs that should lead humans back to their own experience of exploitation and their own history within symbolic orders of production and reproduction. But instead of reading the clone as sign, the clone is taken as human and the difference between the two “becomes so unrecognizable that they … fall in love.” As a result, the conclusion of the film for Harvey is “sheer escapism,” shedding all possibility for the revolt and rescue of humanity (311-14).
 
If Deckard has lost the ability to distinguish between human and clone, Harvey retains the ability to make this judgment. In a striking moment, Harvey steps outside the film to comment from the position of viewer on the film’s “depressing side” (313). In this move to mourn the loss of the human in the slide between human and replicant, Harvey preserves a structure of feeling external to the film. While the longing of the replicants remained essentially an empty structure that led them and, most importantly, humans nowhere, the melancholia of the critic as viewer maintains the hope of remembering and recuperating the shared origins of the human under the exploitative conditions of production and reproduction.
 
A reframing of Blade Runner through Cheang’s I.K.U. asks if anything other than an empty structure of feeling and human copy ever existed. The Coder is a figure for pure expenditure. The very contours of its body conform to maximize each sexual experience for its johns and for the intercepting gaze of film viewers. Each segment features a different mutation of the first Coder programmed in the elevator. Despite the Coder’s absolute use, its facial and bodily gestures are disconnected from any sense of depth that could be read as human psychic structure. Like the various consoles that riddle each scene, the Coder’s expressions during and after sex are flat icons for consumption. No psychic or corporeal space rests outside instrumentalization, where human subjectivity can emerge, however compromised.
 
The I.K.U. Coder’s affectless state of absolute use cannot be read as symptom. In Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson proposes:
 

Let us stress again the enormity of a transition which leaves behind it the desolation of Hopper’s buildings or the stark Midwest syntax of Sheeler’s forms, replacing them with the extraordinary surfaces of the photorealist cityscape, where even the automobile wrecks gleam with some new hallucinatory splendour. The exhilaration of these new surfaces is all the more paradoxical in that their essential content—the city itself—has deteriorated or disintegrated to a degree surely still inconceivable in the early years of the 20^th century, let alone in the previous era. How urban squalor can be a delight to the eyes, when expressed in commodification, and how an unparalleled quantum leap in the alienation of daily life in the city can now be experienced in the form of a strange new hallucinatory exhilaration … Nor should the human figure be exempted from investigation, although it seems clear that for the new aesthetic the representation of space itself has come to be felt as incompatible with the representation of the body: a kind of aesthetic division of labour far more pronounced than in any of the earlier generic conceptions of landscape, and a most ominous symptom indeed.
 

(76)

For Jameson, even the squalor of urban architecture gleams with the collapse of depth that characterizes the object world and the subject within postmodernism. In contrast to the depth-based aesthetics of alienation in high modernism, postmodernism is experienced as a free-floating and impersonal euphoria. A hermeneutic relationship to artwork and a metaphysical conception of the self no longer hold when all is commodified into flat images without content. Drawing from a Lacanian account of schizophrenia, Jameson insists that the world becomes a shiny film comprised of floating signifiers, disconnected from one another and from the intentionality of any subject. These dislodged signifiers give rise to a “hallucinatory exhilaration.” Older divisions of labor derived from a grounded organization of space and the human body itself no longer apply. A new division of labor occurs in the fragmented aesthetic of the “emergent sensorium” that Jameson reads in its nascent state in Van Gogh’s high modernist painting (58-64).

 
Yet, the depthless, floating signifiers of the postmodern world must be returned to a depth-model interpretation for Jameson. They are re-subjected to a symptomatic reading that traces the adamantly flat surfaces of the contemporary world back to what is Jameson’s primary analytic grounding—the economic world system of multinational capitalism. In the last instance, the hallucinatory euphoria of postmodernism must be squared with the “enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions” (80, my emphasis). Reality creeps back in a second, less perceivable strata. This move, I would argue, is only made possible through driving a wedge between a euphoric aesthetic condition and a capitalist political economy imagined as anchored in the objective terms of production, or division of labor. Jameson essentially separates capitalist production from the slew of racial, gendered, classed imaginaries that enable the organization and extraction of labor, thereby reaestheticizing capital itself. Only by making this separation can Jameson continue to follow a tripartite order of capitalist development from market capitalism, to monopoly or imperialist capitalism, finally to multinational capitalism, in which “precapitalist” tributary organizations of capitalism are ultimately eliminated (78). Jameson’s own cultural schema of development from realism, to modernism, to postmodernism builds on this economic tripartite.⁹
 
While critiques of postmodern discourse are now familiar, I am particularly interested in stressing the move to retrace the symbolic orders of production and reproduction through unfixed signifiers that purportedly exceed these symbolic orders. Ultimately, longing for Harvey and euphoria for Jameson become signposts for productivity—the quintessential sign for the human. These postmodern renderings of Marxist analysis continue to re-inscribe the priority of the human subject and the human’s singular corporeal form against its objectification within relations of production.¹⁰ In I.K.U., the pure expenditure of the Coder is neither a condition nor symptom that can be traced to a more concrete reality in anything resembling a political economy. It is questionable whether the Coder’s accumulation of sexual experiences can be called labor, if labor is considered an objective measure of the embodied social output invested into a commodity. Laboring social body and commodity object cannot be separated when the relationship between the two is not production, reproduction, or even enjoyment, but rather the collection of sexual experience. If production in I.K.U. cannot be thought as a primary moment or space of social initiation and human subjectivity, conscious or unconscious, then the presumed temporal and spatial divisions between production, distribution, and consumption as separate moments and stages in a capitalist political economy are made untenable.¹¹
 

 

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Fig. 4.

Scene from I.K.U. Runner and Coder bound through the most minimal displays of agency and freedom in I.K.U.’s machinic world.

© Eclectic DVD 2000.

 

Frame Three: Machine Sex-Sexuality

 
The Coder of Cheang’s I.K.U. embodies the impossibility of a recuperated humanism in the face of technological dominance—a dominance expressed sexually. According to Michel Foucault, sexuality plays a pivotal role in translating sovereign authority to self-regulatory power in liberal democratic societies. For Foucault, sexuality becomes a mobile cultural object that aggregates and multiplies the fields of influence (political, scientific, and medical) that compose decentralized, liberal capitalist states. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault reads sex as “unique signifier” and “universal signified” that manages, enforces, and extends life at the macro-levels of society and species and at the micro-level of individual self. Sexuality as a pivotal target and mobilizer of knowledge and political mastery enables the redirection and transformation of the sovereign “right to kill” into the modern state’s “right to make live” the social body (Society). Echoing Foucault’s discussion of sexuality, sex as biological or phenotypical foundation and sexuality as internal truth of the self are conflated in Cheang’s I.K.U. Far from an expression of fact or intimacy, sex-sexuality is a mobile imaginary that mutates according to the external and interconnecting demands of an abstract network of authority that the Coder’s sexual roving connects up.
 
Whereas Foucault retains the body (as mass and individual) and interiority as the residual and excessive effects of regulatory networks of modern power, Cheang’s I.K.U. does not offer reprieve from the commands issued by its multimedia network. Sexuality in I.K.U.’s world expresses the non-difference between sovereignty and autonomy. The Coder’s drive to seek out sexual experiences and its performed enjoyment of sex seem to express free will and desire. Moreover, its mobility across different spaces and its bodily flexibility give the impression of autonomy. Yet, as programmed human clone, all aspects of the Coder serve the function of data extraction and accumulation. Also, the Coder’s movements are not only tracked and surveilled by a network of media machines, but are also followed and watched by film viewers. Wendy Chun describes the constrained autonomy experienced in digital networks as “control-freedom,” a new formation of U.S. political power facilitated and exemplified by information technologies.¹² Ultimately, the Coder’s autonomy comprises nothing more than machinic activities that give the most minimal outputs of liveliness: mobility and flexibility as individual freedom, connectivity as collectivity, extraction and accumulation as passionate experience. Rather than mourning the downfall of anthropomorphic life, I.K.U. seems to follow Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker in suggesting that human life as ontological “being” never existed outside minimal cues for “life,” including the barest signs of vitality at work in information technologies. And in I.K.U., the downgraded indicators of autonomous life are synonymous with command, reporting, monitoring, and surveillance by a multimedia network that exerts sovereign yet decentralized control.
 
In I.K.U., sex as binary difference between male and female, secured through sexual object choice, becomes alternating binary code.¹³ With an arm that transforms into a dildo-pointer, the feminine Coder’s entire body surface, beyond what is considered proper sexual organs, mutates as a sexual extension. It is a shifting transgender configuration of code and image, without claims to essential sex or stable concrete body. As J. Jack Halberstam proposes in “Technotopias: Representing Transgender Bodies in Contemporary Art,” the transgender body retains its ambiguity and ambivalence, irreducible to the transsexual body. The Coder itself is a multimedia network, receiving and storing input from, as well as sending output to, multiple synced sources. As a counterpart, the masculine Runner who programs and de-activates the Coder occupies the outskirts of the network. “He” acts as a direct relay between an unseen authority, to whom/which he reports, and the Coder in action. While the Coder is a product of encoding, the Runner’s body seems to be made of flesh. The Runner’s transgenderism is expressed through an undecidable body morphology in which so-called primary physical symbols of sex are indistinguishable from secondary indicators for gender. A bulge in the pants, like facial hair, only gives a cue about gender identity, without becoming a master signifier for sex.
 

 

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Fig. 5.

Scene from I.K.U. Virus Tokyo Rose transmits an invitation to an audience member as she performs her “Net Glass Show.”

© Eclectic DVD 2000.

 

 
In contrast to Coder and Runner, the Tokyo Rose Virus seems retrograde in its sexual embodiment and activities. It takes stable female bodily form, without prosthetics, ambiguities, morphs, and blends. And its communication style is neither a network with multiple interfaces nor two-way relay, both of which operate through the distribution of technological authority. Instead, Tokyo Rose uses telepathic lure and projection to ensnare Coder and viewers. The segment featuring Tokyo Rose’s “Net Glass Show” opens with a view from above while a pink Tokyo spins in a net below, before the screen becomes visible as green grid with a target mark at center (see Fig. 5 above). The screen-grid hones in and out of the faces of Tokyo’s audience of suited men wearing 3-D goggles. Viewers get a two-part panoramic view of a pink image of Tokyo licking a dildo in its net, superimposed partially onto a green image of the goggled audience below. The view becomes visible as screen once again as the green grid targets an audience member, the only masculine I.K.U. Coder in the film. After a few spliced segments, the screen-grid refocuses on the masculine Coder as it licks its fingers. A text-box appears mid-screen-grid:
 

“You are a special guest tonight
Please come to the backstage
Tokyo Rose”

 
Pulled by the invitation, the masculine Coder (and viewers who lurk in this exchange) meets Tokyo Rose “backstage,” where they have sex among moving metal screen walls and an analogue telephone switchboard. When the Coder penetrates the Virus, its body disintegrates into scrambled codes, and it is deactivated and disconnected from the I.K.U. network. If the Coder is a free-roving instrument within a decentralized, commanding network and the Runner a relay between the network’s “inside” and “outside,” the Virus lodges itself in the network’s core and reveals the vulnerability and limitations of the network’s hardware. The Virus reveals the cables and circuit boards that comprise the otherwise disembodied notion of cyberspace.¹⁴ All three protagonists inhabit the ecosystem of the I.K.U. network. But only the Virus inserts tension into the system as a byproduct that infiltrates and hijacks the multimedia network towards non-productive dysfunction.¹⁵
 
In Cheang’s I.K.U., sex-sexuality is synonymous with the barest operations of a machinic system. Without feeling, the film cancels out any claim to sexual subjectivity or “bodies and pleasures” reserved as yet-unintelligible potential for counter-hegemonic opposition.¹⁶ Identical to multimedia technologies in I.K.U., sex-sexuality in the film provides interfaces with connectivity, mobility, accumulation, control, and transmission without the possibility of actual interaction. Sex cannot mediate the relationship between individuals and between community and individual across public/private divides. In “Sex in Public,” Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue for the countercultural potential of queer public sex, where queer is taken to embody all sexual practices, including failed or queered heterosexual ones, that do not fit the privatized mold of heteronormative domesticity. For Berlant and Warner, the ephemeral intimacies of queer public sex critique and cathect the heteronormative lodging of sexuality as the essential property of personhood and the reproductive seed for normative family and national community. They propose:
 

Queer and other insurgents have long striven, often dangerously or scandalously, to cultivate what good folks used to call criminal intimacies. We have developed relations and narratives that are only recognized as intimate in queer culture: girlfriends, gal pals, fuckbuddies, tricks. Queer culture has learned not only how to sexualize these and other relations, but also how to use them as a context for witnessing intense and personal affect while elaborating a public world of belonging and transformation. Making a queer world has required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation. These intimacies do bear a necessary relation to a counterpublic—an indefinitely accessible world conscious of its subordinate relation.
 

(199)

Berlant and Warner argue that the fleeting material of queer intimacy is criminal in relationship to heteronormative forms of intimacy, which are secured discursively by narratives of sentiment and also materially by law, domestic architecture, and the zoning of work and politics as non-intimate realms (203). Criminal queer intimacies have affective impact and build collective ties, even a counterpublic, without the anchors amassed by heteronormative meta-culture.

 
In the world of I.K.U., however, the public/private divide presumed by Berlant and Warner does not exist. If sex can no longer be considered host to any intimate material, subordinate or dominant, the publics associated with economic and political collectivities, exchanges, and spaces are also devoid of material. I.K.U.’s future envisions the local as a series of close-ups in which the signs of a specialized locale and sexual experience underway give viewers a sense of peering into an intimate, subterranean location. In one segment, a Coder runs through an empty underground garage where it encounters a male hustler orally servicing a male drug dealer inside a moving car. Getting in the car, the Coder and the two men drive past a touring white heterosexual couple, who demand better quality (non-I.K.U.) sex pills, and two ecstatic drag queens in an elevated parked convertible. All indicators point to a subcultural location, including the literal underground placement of the garage and references to informal economies of gay cruising, gay hustling, drug dealing, drag performance, and drug rolling.
 
Yet, no local scene emerges as a dense site of cultural practices and intimacies, giving neither a microcosm of a larger social world nor an alternative world. Each location is an installation made up of markers for a generic setting, like the parking indicators on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the garage, and markers for encounters that appear intimate through intense expressions, gestures, and actions with only incidental meaning. The Coder runs with urgency, but without purpose, through the garage. The drug dealer drives in circles inside the garage without motive other than prolonging a blowjob, flimsy encounters with buyers (no money is ever exchanged), or a change in scenery. These signs for cultural and geographic specificity have no significance beyond providing surface cues for local scale. Cheang’s I.K.U. seems to suggest the ephemeral, inauthentic nature of expressions of geographic and cultural specificity in the face of a more generalized global drive towards the appearance of motility and exchange. Emphasizing the imbrication of local and transnational scales, Arjun Appadurai’s Fear of Small Numbers looks at the co-dependent relationship between the “cellular” organization of global capitalism and a “vertebrate” structure of nation-states in contributing to ethnic strife and terrorism.
 
Without authentic delineation between private and public spaces and exchanges, the Habermasian private/public distinction appropriated and re-asserted by Berlant and Warner is moot. As illustrated in their analysis of a performance at a local gay bar featuring erotic vomiting, queer counterpublics rely on non-discursive contagious affect as a means of amassing a collective subculture. But this move from bodily performance to collectivity involves a bifurcation between audience and stage, set, or frame. It essentially redraws a boundary between internal subjectivity, even based in what eludes it, and something external that watches, or in the words of Berlant and Warner, something that “witness[es] intense and personal affect” (199).
 

 

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Fig. 6.

Scene from I.K.U. Viewers participate in an unidentified mainframe that pictures, quantifies, and extracts the sexual experiences accumulated by the Coder.

© Eclectic DVD 2000.

 

Frame Four: Viral Spectatorship

 
Everything is given up to sight in I.K.U. From the moment of entry, the film bombards viewers with multiple screen-images of virtual landscapes, animated holograms, gaming consoles, military grids, and advertisement logos. The mutating Coder is captured from every angle as it moves through each sexual assignment. And even the experience of corporeality and feeling imagined as the most interior and as eluding faculties of sight—the penetrative orgasm—is pictured.
 
Signaling the conclusion of a sexual experience, the Coder of the moment readies its arm, which morphs into a digitally animated dildo-penis. The dildo-arm thrusts into its male and/or female john/s anally or vaginally, as if the movement is out of its control. The viewer is then treated to a digitally animated view of the dildo-arm moving in and out of an internal scene. Although this interior scene follows a more distanced view of the Coder positioning itself to penetrate its johns, once the dildo-arms goes inside, the head of the dildo-arm faces the viewer rather than facing outward. The viewer peers into the scene of penetration as if s/he were already inside the space being penetrated and, ultimately, as if s/he her/himself were being penetrated. But, even with what might seem like the wildest realization of interiority visually captured, the penetrated interior appears as impenetrable surfaces on all sides, without depth. The viewer is fucked and flattened into a surface, while the Coder racks up data points. Essentially, the morphing Coder pierces the viewing screen and moves into the viewer’s side of the screen, making sure that s/he knows that s/he is on the receiving end of a shared plane.
 
The flattening out of penetrative sex through its visualization parts with conceptions of vision based on epistemological and phenomenological models, including those attempting to return vision to the materiality of the corporeal senses, against its objectification. In Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” Linda Williams differentiates her critique of the cinematic apparatus from Laura Mulvey’s reframing of the Freudian fetish and the apparatus theories of Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry. Williams shifts the weight of analysis away from an oedipal structure of fetishization and the presumption of a structure of desire pre-inscribed in the subject. Instead of finding a purely psychic structure at the heart of the cinematic apparatus, Williams treats cinema as a visual technology and as a dense synapse of discourses on sexuality that produces visual “hard-core” knowledge and pleasure based on naturalized sexual difference. Cinema itself is hard-core at its inception in its desire to quantify bodily movement, as illustrated in Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion, and in its superfluity, which is coded as female. In the genre of hard-core pornography specifically, this primitive desire is narrativized as the urge to extract an involuntary confession of pleasure—the female orgasm—against the impossibility of its visual objective measure in a “frenzy of the visible.” While Williams reframes cinematic spectatorship as an interplay between a visual technological drive, conflated with male desire, and its female object of erotic surplus, Laura Marks’s “haptic visuality” attempts to overrun the optic tracking of cinematic visuality altogether. In Touch: Sensory Theory and Multisensory Media, Marks draws from the work of art historian Alois Riegl in contending that haptic visuality haunts optic visuality as an embodied organization of looking that emphasizes touch and kinesthetics over sight. Haptic looking builds an erotic intersubjective relation between a haptic image, which invites the viewer to dissolve her/his subjectivity in bodily contact, and a viewer that actively labors to constitute the haptic image from latency. In contrast to an optical image, which requires identification with figures depicted in abstract space, a haptic image brushes against the look of the viewer as a surface. For Marks, digital video in particular is the ideal medium for producing haptic images, with its signal-based image, low contrast ratio, openness to electronic and digital manipulation, and decay.
 
Like Williams’s “frenzy of the visible,” then, Marks’s “haptic looking” exceeds the optical and psychic structure of spectatorship mapped in apparatus theories. Whereas Williams focuses on the dynamics of (over)animation and failure in wresting visual sexual truths, Marks emphasizes the collapse of depth perception into an intersubjective surface, or skin, between haptic viewer and haptic (digital) image. Although Marks’s phenomenologically valenced theorization adds the angle of “deliberate” haptic viewing, both Marks and Williams nevertheless coordinate visual technology, viewing subjectivity, and visual object (Williams) or image (Marks) into a synchronized bundle. For Williams, this bundle of vision moves like a well-oiled machine:
 

The woman’s ability to fake the orgasm that the man can never fake (at least according to certain standards of evidence) seems to be at the root of all the genre’s attempts to solicit what it can never be sure of: the out-of-control confession of pleasure, a hard-core “frenzy of the visible.”
 
The animating male fantasy of hard-core cinema might therefore be described as the (impossible) attempt to capture visually this frenzy of the visible in female body whose orgasmic excitement can never be objectively measured.
 

(50)

Cinematic technologies, cinematic viewing, and male fantasy continue to be conflated on the side of vision as the “animating male fantasy of hard-core cinema.” Moreover, Williams continues to rely on a dyadic structure of viewing that locks the triadic compression of viewing, technologies, and phallocentric fantasy to its animating object, the female body’s invisible orgasm.

Although Marks’ haptic viewing seems to undo a dyadic structure of vision based on identification and objectification, haptic intersubjectivity continues to hold onto a dyadic-monadic joining of viewer and image-medium. Marks argues:
 

Haptic images invite the viewer to dissolve his or her subjectivity in the close and bodily contact with the image. The oscillation between the two creates an erotic relationship, a shifting between distance and closeness. But haptic images have a particular erotic quality, one involving giving up visual control. The viewer is called on to fill in the gaps in the image, engage with the traces the image leaves. By interacting up close with an image, close enough that figure and ground commingle, the viewer gives up her own sense of separateness from the image.

(13)

Viewing binds together viewer, image, and viewing technology (video), which for Marks is indistinguishable from the haptic image.  
For both Williams and Marks, then, apparatus theories serve not only as a point of departure and revision, but also as a lingering organizing principle that synchronizes visual medium, subjectivity (psychic and/or corporeal), and object/image.

I.K.U.’s visual capturing of female and male orgasm does not compute with the dialectical framework presumed in Williams’s and Marks’s automation of vision. The film’s scenes of penetration, viewed from the interior, may seem to wrest for the viewer an invisible confession of fe/male pleasure, which is to also de-animate the dyad that comprises animating object and cinematic viewing. Yet, the scenes of penetration are anything but penetrative. The so-called interior is a virtual grid, and the Coder’s dildo-penis (itself already signaling the impossibility of the phallus) is also a surface, even as it penetrates. Orgasm, as the non-representable sublime of female interiority and of disavowed male corporeal interiority, becomes nothing more than a display of surfaces and the warped computerized sounds of orgasmic heat. Interiority itself is flattened and turned outward towards the viewer as yet another compulsory surface that hails the viewer as someone internal to the scene of penetration, or more accurately, as merely another surface among surfaces. Moreover, there is no one at the controls. The Coder’s penetrating arm, like the Coder itself, moves at the whim of some unidentifiable source that never materializes beyond trace elements like the Runner. The dyad between a desiring penetrative force, in alignment with vision, and interiority dispels into unsynchronized screen-surfaces at the caprice of an unverifiable sovereign.
 
I.K.U.’s take on vision ultimately de-synchronizes the dual structure of racialized gender assumed in the dyadic binding of vision. For Williams, cinematic vision remains resolutely male, while its animating object of desire is female. In recommitting to this gender dyad, she fails to question the production of interiority itself as a sign of white femininity. I would push Williams’s notion of mutual animation further in proposing that the drive to make visible the feeling of interiority, sexualized as female pleasure, itself generates the corporeality and interiority of the white female body. White female corporeality, as an embodiment of interior feeling, materializes in the obsessive visualization of the female body, animated by an implanted interiority. White female embodiment, as corporealized interiority, emerges in this process wherein interior and exterior, feeling and body are mutually generated. Paired with the elusive bodily object of female interiority is a disembodied male visual drive, aligned with cinematic technology. White male corporeality, as technologically propelled desire, crystallizes alongside white female corporeal interiority in a heteronormative dyad.
 
At first glance, Marks seems to evade this racial re-gendering of vision. But the orientation of the viewer towards the receptive (rather than projective) technologies of video draws from an erotic imaginary related to the maternal body. Drawing from psychoanalytically inflected theories of object-relations, Marks associates haptic visuality with the relationship between mother and infant and its oscillation between immersion and identification. The yielding, rather than commanding, “shared embodiment” or “caress” of haptic eroticism draws from what is imagined as the threshold corporeality of the mother. The maternal body occupies a close yet unattainable in-between space for the infant (and male lover), caught up in a play of unindividuated desire and loss. As in Williams, the deracinated, eroticized female body takes shape within a white racial imaginary that animates a male/female, masculine/feminine binary associated respectively with activity (even in surrender)/receptivity.
 
With I.K.U., the Euro-American imaginary in which the female body and femininity constitute the threshold between visible and non-visible worlds becomes marked.¹⁷ The Coder and Virus Tokyo Rose appear through roving screens that promise nothing beyond the hyper-visibility to which everything has already been subjected, including the corporeal and psychic recesses of female and male bodies. The superimposed screen-images which picture Coder and Virus move autonomously without anchor in any identifiable visual technology aligned with the viewer. And the viewer her/himself is internalized within the film, folded into I.K.U. as another surface used, as another “it.” Or, as Mark Poster puts it, the binary distinction between subject and object dissipates.¹⁸ Vision is neither liminal membrane nor drive constituting object and subject of sight, even at the dissolve of these positions.
 
Taken to extreme, Cheang’s I.K.U. eclipses the emphasis on visibility as a measure for cultural and political progress. As Rey Chow contends, visibility fails to redress marginalization when the conditions of possibility for visibility, as a form of and demand for knowledge, are not examined.¹⁹ In I.K.U., nothing exists outside of visibility as a totalizing imaginary premised on compulsory interfaces between screen-images without depth, propelled without internal or external source. In other words, there is no distinction between image and imaginary in I.K.U. The film, therefore, pushes towards a collapse of dialectic models of interpretation that continue to subtend cinematic, visual, and cultural critique. And it does so without the ambivalent possibilities and complicities indexed through affect, as that which constitutes and exceeds the visible image. I.K.U.’s compulsory imaginary, without pleasure or terror, hinges on the plasticity of the Asian feminine body.
 

 

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Fig. 7.

Scene from I.K.U. Coder takes Asian feminine form as an embodiment of technological instrumentalization.

© Eclectic DVD 2000.

 

 
When viewed as provoking an encounter with the cultural fantasy of the Asian feminine body, Cheang’s I.K.U. reframes discourses on alternative (sometimes considered exemplary) formations of capitalism in the Asia-Pacific. Intervening in these discourses, Pheng Cheah, in “Chinese Cosmopolitanism in Two Senses and Postcolonial National Memory,” tracks the conflation of so-called Confucian-based cosmopolitan capitalism with Chinese diasporas as an effect of the incorporative tactics of globalization and Southeast Asian state regimes. In I.K.U., the objective categories of capital, technology, and nation-state are powered by the sexual extensions and morphing of the Coder’s racialized body. This cipher buttresses public discourses and ultimately determines these discourses as its constitutive matter—without materiality. I.K.U. refuses the division between cultural imagination, on one side, and economic and political discourses, on the other, and instead proposes something like economic and political imaginaries that produce exploitation, without traceable structural sources. Capital is the absolutely commodified, autonomous body of the Asian feminine Coder, commanded and programmed by an entity that never appears on scene. This overtaking of objective economic and political categories by a cultural imaginary has nothing to do with a new stage of capitalism. In I.K.U., there are no remnants of any past. The melding of cultural imaginary and political economic structures, of private and public, of pre-social and social exists without memory or possibility of change.
 

Conclusion: Neither the Medium nor the Message

 
My engagement with Cheang’s I.K.U. may appear to be a reckless razing of some of the conceptual grounds for prevalent approaches to cultural or social problematics. Yet, this piece attempts to shift the terms of critique towards a limit case in cultural and social strategies premised on the rational concept of mediation. The Coder denies the possibility of technological mediation by multimedia forms, and accompanying critical apparatuses (which operate themselves as technological modes), in producing and enhancing human subjectivity. And the Coder also rejects the notion of ideological mediation as a strategy for addressing the encoding of dominant social relations in multimedia content.²⁰ This ideological version of mediation too often poses the possibility of rehabilitating normative subjectivity, especially in racial and sexual terms, through the rectifying labor of criticism or the appropriative pleasure of spectatorship. The Coder’s instrumental exploitation by a sovereign network is too asymmetrical a condition to be understood or countered through measured concepts of subjectivity, commodification, and labor. I.K.U. refuses the grounds of critical debate, when posed as the medium versus the message.²¹
 

 

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Fig. 8.

Scene from I.K.U. Identification displays for morphing I.K.U. Coder and Virus Tokyo Rose

© Eclectic DVD 2000.

 

 
Protagonists of I.K.U. embody images of racial and gender flexibility, mutability, and mobility. Coded Asian feminine, both Coder and Virus are screen-images whose verbal and physical expressions read as displays and transmissions (see Fig. 8 above). The Coder speaks techno-jibberish that sounds Japanese, interspersed with techno-English acronyms like “ISDN.” And, although the Virus communicates without speaking, its identification display bears illegible encryptions that look like Thai, Japanese, or Chinese writing. Both Coder and Virus are technological bodies that morph and perform according to the demands of their programming (or anti-programming). As Laura Hyun Yi Kang proposes in Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women, the spatial-temporal delineations of global capitalist development depends on the figuring of the undifferentiated category of Asian women, fixed within a retrograde past of capitalist progress as docile bodies, complementing all types of exploitative labor (from assembly to prostitution).
 

 

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Fig. 9.

Scene from I.K.U. Identification display for I.K.U. Runner.

© Eclectic DVD 2000.

 

 
As a complementary, yet differentiated entity in I.K.U., the Runner is coded black masculine, taking the form of mutated human flesh rather than mutating technology (see Fig. 9 above). While Coder and Virus are objects inhabiting the parameters of the network, the Runner operates just outside the network as a transmitter. The Runner’s intermediary position between internal network and external command is expressed through direct interaction with surveillance cams and an activation/deactivation tool resembling a gun. Also, in contrast to the incomprehensible, yet language-like communication of Coder and Virus, the Runner speaks clearly in what is identifiably American English. As suggested by Roderick Ferguson, the militarized re-masculinization of black masculinity, according to heteronormative and patriotic sexual, gender, and familial standards, became a U.S. state sponsored project in the effort to neutralize Civil Rights social agitation and growing contradictions in capitalist expansion.²²
 
Asian feminine Coder and Virus and black masculine Runner embody co-dependent racial prototypes. They provide minimal indicators of cultural specificity to enable generalization into racial form. The Coder’s Japanese-ness and the Virus’s Southeast or East Asian-ness connote the kinds of abstract ethnic and regional particularity that characterizes pan-Asian racialization as both always foreign and already assimilated in reference to American national identity. The Runner’s racial blackness serves as a transnationally recognizable, exportable sign for American multiculturalism, eliding the history of racism, apartheid, and enslavement that is part of the racialization of African diasporas. These racial modules operate through sexualization. Against the normative image of gender-differentiated sexual interiority attributed to racial whiteness, the Coder and Runner in particular are racially marked by their transgenderism and pansexuality. The Coder’s body is a gender-morphing surface that treats both male and female johns as undistinguished objects for penetration and sexual data extraction. The Runner’s body is corporeally undecided in its gender, and “his” sexual ventures extend beyond the feminine Coder he activates, to include a male hustler in an alternate ending to the film. Runner and Coder offer counterpoints to the binary system of gender that is tied to complimentary sexual object choice and at work in normative versions of heterosexuality and homosexuality.
 
Together, I.K.U. Coder, Virus, and Runner seem to realize a utopian vision of a multicultural, gender flexible, sexually liberated world. Yet, in Cheang’s film, these racial, gender, and sexual markers for equality and freedom are not only constricted but subordinated by a sovereign network of multimedia technologies. All three protagonists, including the Runner who seems to occupy a position external to the network, function as part of the network’s totalizing system of image and data display, extraction, transmission, and storage. In I.K.U., representational technology and representational content are identical. They express machinic signs of autonomy—mobility, connectivity, and accumulation—which remain subjected to an unseen authority. Despite I.K.U.’s zero-grade utopia, the film never strikes a dystopian chord.²³ Rather than calling for a rescue from negative imagery, I.K.U. engages in what Celine Parreñas Shimizu calls a “race-positive” sexual politics, which does not strive for normative status. At the same time, the film makes visible the sexual racial fantasies that fundamentally structure the project of cultural representation. Addressing the role of fantasy, Hortense Spillers describes the disfiguring translation of the captive African body into sensuous mathematical symbols, quantified for transport, sale, and purchase.²⁴ And Trinh T. Minh-ha highlights the racialized fascination with East Asia underpinning the legacy of Saussurian semiotics.²⁵
 
Cheang’s I.K.U. hyperbolizes the limitations that accompany racial and sexual visibility within a reductive economy of cultural representation that values circulation and accumulation above all. Within the context of globally expanding liberal capitalism, the multimedia film compels viewers to embrace our objectification as machines exhibiting minimal vital signs. It pushes us to abandon our longing to rescue the human in us, if only to redirect us towards what might lie beyond the parameters of the merely imaginable.