Hysterical Drift



It's perhaps the first insight of any scrupulous ludistics that the
pleasures derived from technologies of constraint are by no means
limited to sadomasochistic ones in the narrow sense of S/M culture. If
any game, and any creative imagination of its players,  can only unfold
within a framework of rules, then there is painful pleasure in every
playing. The French group Oulipo, founded as the literary section of the
Collège de Pataphysique in 1960, understood this early when it created a
systematic poetics of self-imposed formal, often computational
constraints. Ever since computers abound, their game rules are messing
with everyday culture, taking our pleasure and pains to whole new
levels. 

When it turns a game computer device  - the Nintendo Gameboy DS - into a
generic network computer in order to turn it again into the control
engine of an urban game, Gordo Savicic's "Constraint City" reflects this
intricacy of games and computing in its very technical design.  It is,
to quote the name of a popular American electronics store chain, a
"Circuit City" in which every circuit is an array of constraints.
Therefore, Constraint City walks pursue, upon first glance at least, no
romantic business like the symbolist and surrealist flaneurs and the
psychogeographers from the 1960s situationists to the contemporary
"generative psychogeographers" of the Dutch project socialfiction.org
who create "social computers" through city walks.

Instead, "Constraint City" could be called hysterical psychogeography.
Medical diagnoses of hysteria abounded in the 19th century. It was
thought of as an exclusively female illness and attributed to an
abundance of symptomes. Ever since Freud founded his psychoanalysis on
his early Studies on Hysteria, the relation between psychoanalysis and
feminism has been problematic and could be characterized as a perverse
pleasure in constraint as well, given how much feminism has argued
within the psychoanalytic paradigm. From a contemporary viewpoint, the
19th century concept of hysteria is plainly bizarre and a textbook
example of the often unacknowledged politics of medicine. No less
remarkable than the diagnosis of hysteria was its treatment: genital
massage, in order to achieve "hysterical paroxysm", or orgasm as it
would be called today. Those massages were manually performed by doctors
and midwives, turned into a profitable source of income for the medical
profession and soon became aided by mechanical devices. "Hydrotherapy"
involved shooting water from a hose onto a woman's genital area
[picture], and in 1880, the first electromechanical vibrator was built
into a doctor's practice.  Reminiscent of the development from the
mainframe to laptop computers, it was a room-filling engine. For men,
onanist strap devices were built that show the perverse alliance of
pleasure and constraint in almost emblematic perfection [picture].

Just as the vibrator was invented to cure hysteria, the straight-jacket
was a device to treat "mania", first mentioned as such in 1791 by the
Scottish medicine professor William Cullen. In Cullen's rationale,
"restraint calms passion". Despite providing no relief of "paroxysm",
the straight jacket corresponds to the vibrator as a means of treating
psychological conditions by tactical application of pressure to the
human body.  "Constraint City" finally marries both technologies. It is
not just a straight jacket, but also a vibrator, massaging the
hysterio-psychogeographical performer who wears the device.  
Turning the performer into a walking phallus, and jerking him off, this
bachelor machine turns formerly female into male hysteria. 

Aside from its psycho-sexual function, or next to it, it is also a
practical technological device.  Since it reacts to encrypted networks
only, its use could be called "inverse war driving", putting upside down
the hacker-cultural practice of exploring cities for open wireless
networks to tap into.  It thus combines 19th century with 21st century
hysterias: electrosmog paranoia, the fear that radio waves damage the
human body; perversely constrained information freedom and privacy,
perversely unrestrained surveillance, for example.  In "Constraint
City", the performer reacts to these issues, and to the encrypted
electomagnetic fields around him, like Themroc in the 1973 anarchist
French movie when the police shoots tear gas at him: he inhales it as a
drug, deriving polymorphously perverse pleasure from it. 

But "Constraint City" can also be played as a social game, just as the
title indicates. Everyone along the performer's walking route can
heighten pain and pleasure by tactically activating network encryption
on their home routers and pointing the signal to the street, a
polymorphous stimulation and flagellation reminiscent of the "abreaction
games" of the Vienna Actionists. Electromagnetic signals that act in the
place of mud, blood and guts are, I think, just the kind of pataphysical
stimulation needed in the much-hyped discourse about "locative" and
"wearable" media.




References: 

Rachel Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and
Women's Sexual Satisfaction, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Studies in the
History of Technology, 1999

William Cullen, The Practice of Physic, Edinburgh 1791, quoted from
http://sj.blacksteel.com/media/mental/p12.html 

Pictures taken from
http://www.slate.com/id/2121835/slideshow/2121919/fs/0//entry/2121909/