By Nicholas Alexander Hayes
Physical loneliness manifests neither in desperation nor in fantasy but in negation. Confronted with mass electronic social networks, an abundance of evidence of this phenomenon is provided by merely opening the links for Craigslist Men Seeking Men. Loneliness provides an elegant symmetry, a fecund annihilation to those willing to participate, especially to those in possession of a digital camera or a camera phone; willingness to enter into an evolved relationship through experience is all that is necessary to be subsumed in a digital bacchanal, a silenean paradise.
Against the insistence of individuality, the pervasive nature of self-importance, which engenders the vast differentiation necessary for loneliness, one can only reject and efface the signifiers of individualization. The gesture of obscuring physical features through cropping, digital manipulation or flash point is on its surface one of preserving identity from the degradation of discovery or ridicule; however, this gesture becomes the proof, creates the apotheosis of sex ad modularity because the central argument of the body pic is that the body, not the individual, is being placed online for trade. Alvin Toffler recognized a similar relational pattern in the urban environment over twenty years ago in Future Shock: “Consciously or not, we define our relationships with most people in functional terms.” Society has gone as far as creating “…the disposable person: modular man”(87-88). The internet has expanded the space of the urban world to anywhere there is sufficient technology and infrastructure allowing, requiring the subsequent expansion of modularity, and the possibility of de-individualization.
Even when a face pic accompanies these ads, neither modularity nor negation of identity is lost although they become harder tasks to manage. Negation’s victory is above all assured in the vague generic descriptions of desires. Whether participants are “[i]nto fit guys between 18-35…” or if “black men [are] a + , but y[sic] open to all,” it is a type to which their loneliness calls out, a set of social/racial/economic conditions that provides a response to their self-perceived lack.
Further in a loneliness provoked by “a 3-day load,” participants hope that it will be answered by a similar loneliness provoked by another “3-day load.” Top, bottom or versatile does not undermine the innate rhizomatic equality spontaneously generated through loneliness. Even the claims of “do anything” or “abuse me” do not shake the equality of negation since the brilliance and strength of the gesture requires individuals to be reduced to a base atomic form—they become the promise of potential action. Logistics may require a loss of pure anonymity; however, a name, a face, an address, a location does not cause loss of anonymity and in no way is a loss of negation since participants remain only potential action, potential experience. Even after consummation, there is the potential of recurrence that must be preserved.
In this activity, the necessary process of distinction, which in other situations culminates in identity, evaporates on contact. Distinction is only important in that it provides a place for knowing, not for doing and is rendered inert and obsolete in this psychic space. It is in this desired action that participants aim for Buber’s I-It relationship—a relationship of experience, a relationship based solely on use-value (56). However, it would be naive and abusive to perceive these ephemeral relationships as flippantly as their participants do. These relationships drive a wedge against the normal but fragile conception of identity since they require a reduction of the pseudo-continuous conglomeration of identity (gender, sex, race, class, education…) into its base parts. For instance, a married lawyer who places an ad and who survived cancer and now mentors at risk teens becomes an object of sympathetic desire only because of his marital status or because he might be Latino; his identity, his specialization, his ethics are rendered inconsequential.
Craigslist sex ads and other online sex-centric personals are not the first realm of modularity in queer history. Gloryholes and public cruising spots provided (and provide) a place of resistance against heteronormative structures and strictures. These places were historically central to giving space to express a predominantly shadow or secondary identity (especially to those who did not [and do not] have the protection of a ghetto environment.) Sexual release reduced the participants to their functions ultimately in an effort to free them from the constraints of their adopted identities. But these online environments do not give just give a space to reveal the hidden identities of str8 and dl men or a place to resist the bastardized heteronormalization framed in Gay marriage or more often its monogamous simulation.
These personal ads in fact do not create a space for individual albeit generic identity; they instead create an amalgamation of identity. When these ads are most effective, individuals enter into a collective identity. The generalizations necessitated by modularization force the participants to become more and less than who they are, more and less than the labels they apply to themselves and their desired objects.
Donna Haraway in her “Cyborg Manifesto” begins to approach the potential that the dissolving borders of human and machine might provoke: “…the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.” The queer approach to this border war as demonstrated in these ads is one that avoids production for the realms of simulation and desire. It is here through the images of the self and the desired (intended on the surface to help those “looking to suck cock & balls & feet & jo”) enter the fray.
The contradiction and irony of the negation of identity to produce a conglomerate identity is essential in the context of multiple planes of loneliness. The call and response of physical loneliness attempts to create Aristophanes’ Children of the Sun, whose pieces are all self-acting for a common goal. However, it is not a return to a Golden Age that will ultimately provide a place for participants; it is the instance of dissolution, the instance where they realize that the components of their identity are now separated from their individual identity and are so entwined in the system of electronic desire that they exist as nodules of a single fungus-like creature whose surface manifestation of a pseudo-individual is inconsequential compared to the vast subterranean network it feeds. It is in this electronic space that intersects with physical location and experience that loneliness, a separation from overt group identification, becomes the catalyst for a mass subterranean identity through desire and experience.
Works Cited
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons. 1970.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in
the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Stanford University: Program in History &
Philosophy of Science & Technology. 1997. 7 Jan. 2007
<http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html>
Toffler, Alvin. Future Shock New York: Random House, 1970.
