“i will kill you and you will survive” / “ i can’t be cruel” / XD

5 December 2012

Sometime during a many-week dry spell in which were weren’t having sex, despite our sharing a bed, a lease, and–as my semester and his health sunk into the sea–two iterations of the same confining depression, Rory was hospitalized because a bundle of scar tissue had twisted his small intestine into what his surgeon said (after five hours with cameras and knives in my boyfriend) looked just like a bird’s nest: it was sometime during this dry spell, which extended for many weeks through his recovery and four re-admissions, that I started going on Chatroulette.

In On Photography, Susan Sontag argues that the proliferation among the American middle class of cheap and relatively easy-to-use cameras led to an expansion of our collective visual culture, claiming, roughly, that as the technology to create images of the world ceased being an esoteric art practiced by the hyper-specialist, camera use became “a social rite, a defense against anxiety, a tool of social power”: that is, as the technology of representation became a part of everyday life, photographs emerged as the documentary relic par excellence–a way to prove incontrovertibly that something existed, that a joyful or outrageous event took place, that one had kin.

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Before a citizenry empowered to create cheap visual relics, let loose to tally up reality from their own individual points of view, the subjects worthy of photographing were likewise democratized, made cheap, interchangeable: that is, amid a glut of images of reality, one picture became, at least ideally, just as worthy of attention as another.

Nearly any computer bought in the last five years in likely to have the built in components–a webcam, high-speed modem, and internal microphone–necessary to get you (democracy in action again) into my rotation on Chatroulette and let you see what I and everyone else is doing with my time; and while this is in many ways the logical extension of the proliferation of images Sontag names as a symptom of modernity (one just as good as another), in a postmodern spiral, the ephemeral images on Chatroulette open as translucent windows to not only images but other gazers who are–if I click next before you do–just as good as another.

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Of course, people come to this forum for different reasons: many come for erotic excitement, either to masturbate with or in front of others (this has largely moved to other sites since Chatroulette instituted more stringent policing policies); many come to meet strangers outside their normal influence (this evening it’s mostly Turks and Spanish men who pay me no mind, except one who draws a muddled purple swastika in the chat window before nexting me); some make a game of it, logging on with friends or putting on masks, either approach valorizing the mild-mannered to act out their transgressive fantasies with live human subjects; others, I presume, have no real agenda, and are happy just to sit in the corner passive in the presence of activity.

Tonight–I’ve only started going back on lately, weeks into another end-of-term dry spell with Rory (his intestines have recovered)–a nineteen year old British boy, who’s framed in my window by thick arms and football jersey, greets me in the text window by calling me a rotten cunt (was it my hat?) before throwing both middle fingers at his webcam and leaving them there, waiting for me to click next, which I don’t do, forcing him to lower his hands, scowl, and click the button himself (I snap his picture for posterity).

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If the reduction of extended families to extended family photos was emblematic of one age, the utter reduction of the live-motion self–the making of myself a throwaway in an exchange that also lets me consume throwaway others–must likewise sound the bell of some shift in relations between image and reality that I’m too beleaguered in to name.

Whatever it’s called, something important happens when I give up being choosy and give myself over to whoever wishes to view me, when I too admit to being just another image moving in real time, interchangeable for another.