The tele-technics of agency, the Net, the urban and sex tourism

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of various tele-technologies (technologies at a distance) on the subject-object relationship within a context of Western conceptualizations about agency, self-other, and thought in relation to action. To examine these effects, the article uses the Internet postings of sex tourists as well as an example of ubiquitous media and screen culture in the form of a Hollywood film. How the loss of writing at a spatial and temporal distance influences these sex tourists, as well as how mass media (cinema) merge anxieties about the subject-object relationship with concerns about the status of individual agency supposedly enhanced by these tele-technologies is considered in the light of how thought has been constructed and understood from the early twentieth century to the present. The media through which thought and action are mediated become the focus of the inquiry.

Keywords:

• Baudrillard
• media and mediation
• subject-object relationships
• sex tourism
• screen culture

Notes

1. This paper was presented at the panel ‘Sex and the Global(izing) City in Asia, co-organized by Shirlena Huang and Brenda Yeoh in Singapore in August 2005. I thank the organizers and other panelists for their comments and questions. This paper comes out of and uses work I did with Lillian Robinson about some seven to ten years ago on sex tourism (1998) as well as work I have been doing with John Phillips for the past five years that engages urbanization processes, modernist aesthetics and military technology, which is to say that it will meet sex and the global Asian city at an oblique angle.

Lillian Robinson died while this article was in revision, and though it might well differ from many of her most deeply held positions, it is nonetheless dedicated to her memory.

2. Jean Baudrillard makes this point in Simulacra and Simulation (1994), amongst his other works. Although Baudrillard has been writing about these issues since the 1960s, his work remains consistently focused on them and shows a prescience and power of analysis that seems more productive now than it forty or so years ago.

3. Baudrillard (1994, pp. 79–86) argues much the same points with regard to communications technologies.

4. This discussion of Adrian, Freud, Bion, and action-at-a-distance comes from a book I have co-authored with John Phillips entitled Unhinging the Senses, under consideration, and was part of a paper presented at a Cold War fiction conference held at the University of London in July 2005. It has been altered to fit with the argument and issues of this paper. The book examines the relationships between nineteenth century speculation into the workings of the senses, early twentieth century avant-garde art and literature, and current military technology that relies on the senses and aesthetics.

5. See Baudrillard (1994).