Jenni's room: Exhibitionism and solitude

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 77-89

  Burgin, Victor ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0041985853     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448999     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. See James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (New York, 1956)
2. In 1996 Ringley was in her final year at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, where she had majored in economics and had developed an interest in webpage design. Here is how she described her technique: 'I use Timed Video Grabber to catch a picture from my Connectix QuickCam every minute. Every three minutes QuickKeys executes an Apple-Script which tells Fetch to upload the picture. . . . And the server sends it to you!' (Jennifer Ringley, JenniCam homepage, www.boudoir.org). The site has since changed address. See www.jennicam.org
3. Jere Downs, 'The JenniCam Ensnares Online Fans into Her Web', Philadelphia Inquirer, 6 July 1997, p. A1; hereafter abbreviated 'JE'; my emphasis
4. Bruce Haring, 'Net Cameras Put Intimacy Online', USA Today, 8 April 1998, p. 5D
5. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud remarks, 'Every active perversion is . . . accompanied by its passive counterpart: anyone who is an exhibitionist in his unconscious is at the same time a voyeur'
6. (Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. [London, 1953-74], 7:167)
7. The developers of CU-SeeMe write: 'CU-SeeMe is a free videoconferencing program (under copyright of Cornell University and its collaborators) available to anyone with a Macintosh or Windows and a connection to the Internet. With CU-SeeMe, you can video-conference with another site located anywhere in the world. By using a reflector, multiple parties at different locations can participate in a CU-SeeMe conference, each from his or her own desktop computer' (www.CU-SeeMe.cornell.edu the site no longer exists). The program has become popular with the gay community, where the images exchanged by means of this videoconferencing program are often scenes of masturbation
8. Ringley, interview with Ira Glass, 'Tales from the Net', This American Life, 6 June 1997, WBEZ-FM, Chicago, 91.5
9. See also singer-songwriter Ana Voog's comment: 'If you wake up in the middle of the night or something with an anxiety attack, it's really nice to know people from all over the world are all there, to comfort you or talk about anything you want. It's just really cool' (Haring, 'Net Cameras Put Intimacy Online')
10. See Jacques Lacan, 'The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience' [1949], Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977), pp. 1-7. Mirrors make various appearances in the writings of psychoanalysts. Freud spoke metaphorically when he recommended that the analyst be a well-polished mirror for his patient. Lacan first presented his notion of the mirror stage in 1936. (The version best known today dates from 1949.)
11. Otto Fenichel spoke of real mirrors when he observed that the mirror, in confronting the individual with his or her own body in an external form, obliterates 'the dividing line between ego and non-ego' (Otto Fenichel, 'The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification' [1935], The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel: First Series, trans. pub., ed. Hanna Fenichel and David Rapaport [New York, 1953], p. 376). Psychoanalysts have also taken note of the ways in which the mirror figures in fields of inquiry outside of psychoanalysis. For example, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Géza Róheim wrote a book on 'looking-glass magic' that drew extensively on his original training as an anthropologist. In Lacan's essay the mirror appears both as metaphor and as objective reality, and there are references to such disciplines beyond psychoanalysis as etymology, ethnology and empirical studies of child behaviour
12. D. W. Winnicott, 'Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child Development' (1967), Playing and Reality (London, 1986), p. 111; hereafter abbreviated 'M'
13. For example, Lacan refers to the mural paintings in the great hall of the Palace of the Doges in Venice and asks: 'Who comes to these places? Those who form . . . the people. And what do the people see in these vast compositions? The gaze of those persons who - when they are not there, they the people - deliberate in this hall. Behind the painting, it is their gaze which is there' (Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre 11: Les Quatres Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse ed. Jacques-Alain Miller [1964; Paris, 1973], p. 104
14. trans. Sheridan, under the title The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller [New York, 1978], p. 113; trans. mod.). In such terms there is some foundation to a widespread tendency in film and photography theory to assimilate considerations of the gaze to Foucault's notion of panopticism
15. (I first criticised this tendency in 'Geometry and Abjection', AA Files, no. 15 [Summer 1987]: 35-41. Much of what Lacan says about the gaze in seminar 11 (1964) is fundamentally similar to what he said in seminar 1 (1953) - apart from an important difference of emphasis derived from a shift from Sartre's phenomenology to that of Merleau-Ponty. What is radically different in the 1964 seminar is Lacan's reformulation of the gaze as objet petit a, as cause of desire
16. See Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, Conn., 1989)
17. Catherine Clément succinctly characterizes the mirror stage as 'the moment when one becomes oneself because one is no longer the same as one's mother' (Catherine Clément, The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [New York, 1983], p. 76)
18. Winnicott writes: 'Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: "Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?" The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated' (Winnicott, 'Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena', Playing and Reality, p. 12)
19. Winnicott, 'The Capacity to Be Alone' (1958), The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (London, 1965), p. 30; my emphasis
20. For a Winnicottian perspective on adolescence and risk taking, see Adam Phillips, 'On Risk and Solitude', chap. 3 of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp. 27-49
21. See Jean Laplanche, 'The Drive and Its Object-Source: Its Fate in the Transference', trans. Martin Stanton, in Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, and the Drives, ed. John Fletcher and Stanton (London, 1992), p. 189
22. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1975), pp. 9-10
23. See Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in Standard Edition, 18:14-17
24. Katherine Philips, Solitude, in Poems (London, 1667), p. 171
25. See Francette Pacteau, 'The Imaginary Companion', The Symptom of Beauty (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 35-56
26. Melanie Klein, 'On the Sense of Loneliness', Our Adult World' and Other Essays (London, 1963), p. 99
27. Philips, Solitude, p.171
28. Baldwin, Giovanni's Room, pp. 112-113
29. See also Winnicott, 'The Fate of the Transitional Object', Psycho-Analytic Explorations, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 53-58