I thought I’d share this. It is taken from a collection of essays *(*[*Towards a Theory of Dark Immersion*](https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1113926/?ref=BlackScreen)) which discuss the emergence of Dark Immersion in virtual culture (a concept for which *Dark Erotica* is just one example).
The general hypothesis is that it is the structure of a culture which creates the conditions under which certain kinds of thought and experience are possible. The essays take the Foucaultean idea that through the modern era, sex was *deployed* rather than *repressed*, and that in the electric networked age, sex (abstracted into ‘sexual fantasy’) provides a means of enmeshing nervous systems in what we call *immersive experience*.
The essays focus on Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard and Georges Bataille and consider Bataille to have been the first man to properly experience the shift from a mechanical rational age to an electric immersive age. What we call ‘immersion’ is the complete involvement of the nervous system in artificial phenomena and other nervous systems. Sexual intensity is one means by which nervous systems can be involved in other nervous systems; the degree of immersion and the intensity of involvement may depend on the extremity of the experience. This then is the key to *Dark Immersion* – it is the use of extreme sexual and emotional experiences to deeply involve nervous systems in reciprocal mutually beneficial games with each other.
The following is an overview of the various ideas mentioned in the essays – it can be viewed either as a summary of the ideas or as an introduction to the ideas. Essentially, it should be viewed as a kind of Foucaultean toolbox, a way of understanding and legitimising forms of *Dark Immersion* in our increasingly virtualised environment.
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# Dark Immersion: Tools and Concepts
## Production and Seduction
Concepts formulated by Jean Baudrillard based on the root of both words. ‘Produce’ comes from the Latin ‘producere’ – ‘to bring out’ or ‘bring forth’; ‘seduce’ comes from the Latin ‘seducere’ – ‘to lead away’ or ‘lead astray’. For Baudrillard, Production is the process of making the hidden visible whereas the force of seduction is derived from what is hidden and invisible.
Of production, he writes:
*”The original sense of ‘production’ is not in fact that of material manufacture; rather, it means to render visible, to cause to appear and be made to appear: pro-ducere … To produce is to force what belongs to another order (that of secrecy and seduction) to materialize. Seduction is that which is everywhere and always opposed to production; seduction withdraws something from the visible order and so runs counter to production, whose project is to set everything up in clear view, whether it be an object, a number, or a concept.”* (Baudrillard, Forget Foucault, p. 37)
Of seduction, he writes:
*”Seduction continues to appear to all orthodoxies as malefice and artifice, a black magic for the deviation of all truths, an exaltation of the malicious use of signs, a conspiracy of signs. Every discourse is threatened with this sudden reversibility, absorbed into its own signs without a trace of meaning.”* (Baudrillard, Seduction, p. 2)
Production therefore is the process of making the world visible, of representing it in signs, of expressing it as real or true. Every truth however is haunted by an internal desire to disappear, to be subverted or destroyed. In this desire for annihilation, we find seduction.
## Symbolic Exchange
Baudrillard derives his notion of symbolic exchange from Bataille’s observation that the destruction of value can be just as important as the creation of value; not only that, but that the very essence of exchange may have been found in loss, not acquisition:
*“Classical economics imagined that primitive exchange occurred in the form of barter; it had no reason to assume, in fact, that a means of acquisition such as exchange might have at its origin not the need to acquire that it satisfies today, but the contrary need, the need to destroy and lose.”* (Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-39, “The Notion of Expenditure”, pg. 121).
Baudrillard develops on this insight to distinguish between the exchanges of pre-modern and modern societies: where the rational exchanges of modern, productive societies emphasize value equivalency and acquisition (in terms of money and utility), pre-modern societies instead saw the value of exchange to be aesthetic, symbolic and contextual.
*“In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given has symbolic exchange value.”* (Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign , ‘The Ideological Genesis of Needs ‘ 1981)
In pre-modern societies, Baudrillard says, symbolic domains such as life and death were not opposed, but were seen as coextensive, for instance a hunter may imbue himself with animal spirits by wearing its skin. By contrast, in rational productive societies exchange is linear, based as it is on accumulation, utility and rational self interest. Life and death are therefore not complimentary (as they would be in a symbolic order), but rather life is cultivated in opposition to death. As we move into an era dominated by distributed virtual and informational technologies, symbolic exchange begins to take on greater primacy than rational linear exchange.
## Negative Exchange
A form of Symbolic Exchange where the values of production and linear rationality would deem the terms of the exchange evil or harmful. Examples of negative exchange may include arguments which intensify and where parties are drawn into ever more destructive altercations, toxic sexual encounters, challenges which demand a counter-response, but also where these relations are mutually beneficial to the various parties through their seductive intensities.
Negative exchanges may be mutual or reciprocal and they may be harmful or destructive. The immersiveness of literary genres like Dark Erotica and Dark Romance are based on such exchanges; so too is Dark Immersion in virtual worlds – kidnap and home invasion fantasies etc. A good example of Negative Exchange is Lydia Lunch’s art installation ‘You’re not safe in your own home’ – the re-creation of a bedroom which is the site of some domestic atrocity. The floor is strewn with broken glass, the walls covered in abusive graffiti, garments of intimate clothing lie scattered over the floor and a phone hangs down with the disembodied voice of a lover pleading for forgiveness from the other end. The installation is not just designed to ‘speak out’ and ‘raise awareness’ of domestic violence, it is there instead to try and express the mutual intensity of the relational exchange. Talking about the installation, Lunch said:
*“I possess a criminal predilection, devoid of all guilt which insists I admit to not only my own crimes of passion, but also my complicity in aggravating others to commit crimes both for and against me.”* (You’re Not Safe in your Own Home, Lydia Lunch)
And:
*“My goal has always been to if not step off the wheel, away from the scaffold, and out from under the guillotine of genetically pre-programmed trauma bonds, to at least recognize that I am not the only one living under a life sentence of willing victim-hood and abuse. With compassion and understanding, I seek to illustrate this eternal dilemma and give voice to those who like myself are forever sick with desire.”* (You’re Not Safe in your Own Home, Lydia Lunch)
## Reality, Hyperreality and Simulation
*”When the world knows beauty as beauty, ugliness arises When it knows good as good, evil arises. Thus being and non-being produce each other.”* (Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 2)
If religious and primitive societies were organised according to symbolic exchanges (through ritual and myth) the hallmark of modern productive societies is that they rely on the rational exposition of what is ‘real’. In positing a domain of ‘the real,’ the modern society necessarily posits a domain of ‘the imaginary’ (which consists of all that we excise from the real). In this, we abandon symbolic organisation in favour of a more technical and bureaucratic form of organisation. We can see this in law, contracts, the bureaucratisation of relationships, the conceptualisation of action through ‘power,’ and ‘equality/equity’ etc.
For Baudrillard, this process leads to a hyperreal system – that is, a system which is stripped of all illusions – a real more real than the real. Once hyperreality has reached a certain intensity, according to Baudrillard, the system begins to enter an era of simulation and simulacra. In the society of simulacra, the world consists not of descriptions of underlying reality, but instead it consists in a system of interconnected man-made models which begin to generate their own truths and their own reality. No longer do the models refer to their origin, they refer to themselves and other models, and in this, they produce altogether new modes of social interaction – simulations.
The era of simulation is characterised by a folding of the real back into the imaginary, only, where the imaginary used to transcend the real and go beyond it, the simulation presents itself as if it were completely real. The two domains (that of physical reality and that of informational hyperreality) become inextricable from one another with individuals finding themselves more or less able to distinguish one from the other; the simulation takes place within oneself as a stand-in for ‘the real world’ (if indeed ‘the real world’ was ever anything more than a fictional model in the first place).
The modern society, based as it is on rationality and ‘reality’, breaks the cycle of symbolic exchange. It transmits its signs as irrefutable objective facts and thereby allows no reply. In this sense, the hyperreal society is a form of violence against those who are subjected to it – a violence insofar as it creates the need for a counter-response, an abreaction which may be found in suicide, terrorism, conspiracy theories, reality denial – any act or utterance which tries to reverse or absorb the force of certainty. Hyperreality is in this way the precondition for ‘power’ – it breaks the cycle of exchange and creates a one-way force with no possibility of reply. All those that it excludes therefore become subject to the experience of its oppressive force. In this way, hyperreality precedes and energizes the era of simulation.
## The Scene
A ‘scene’ refers to an event that evolves according to the rules of symbolic exchange and simulation. It is not evaluable in linear moral terms, but instead can only be evaluated in terms of its reciprocity and mutuality. A scene is an event produced by its participants, a collaboration of symbolic behaviours, gestures, actions, speech, an interplay of concepts and desires which serve to create or simulate some phenomenon which is meaningful to the actors.
A scene may appear ugly, barbaric, and yet for it to be properly counted as ‘a scene’ it must be reciprocal and mutual; all participants must be involved and complicit in the transferrent energies of its production. A scene is in the order of ‘simulation’ insofar as it threatens the difference between true and false, reality and imagination. To simulate is not the same thing as pretending – a person could pretend they were ill, but the reality here would remain intact for the patient would only be masking reality; to simulate an illness however would mean the patient would produce some symptoms and thereby collapse the imaginary and the real: the symptoms are real to the extent that they make the patient sick, they are imagined to the extent that medicine would have no effect. The same is true of ‘the scene’ – it collapses the imaginary and the real – it is not faked (like in the case of a play where the actors know they are not the characters); rather, the actors are collapsed and immersed in the event as if the event were real.
The scene is most powerful when the exchanges are negative. This is because negative scenes more obviously fold truth into falsehood, reality into imagination. A negative scene is seductive precisely because it overturns the dominant productive moral order and is an event not easily quantified or commodified. A negative simulation thrives on turning the terms of linear reason against itself.
## Conceptual Tactility
Increased use of networked digital media conditions in us a heightened capacity for remote, dislocated tactile sensation. Examples include 3D modelling, animation, virtual world interaction, chat-room roleplay, ASMR videos. As a creator, one imagines the object that one is acting on and in imagining it, gives it a pseudo-physical presence. Operations performed on this pseudo-real return tactile feelings to the creator without them actually touching anything. Similarly, people encountering the object, animation, ASMR, respond physically to the detail of these artefacts. Conceptual tactility comes with a shift from opinionated and propositional content and substitutes it with an experiential or aesthetic content.
In this, we can see a virtualisation of relational life – a kind of psychic interactivity that stands in for physical interactions. This can be seen in forms of modern transexuality where there is a shift from ‘sex-attraction’ (based on physical bodies) to ‘gender-attraction’ (which is based more on an attraction to an inner life, a spiritual maleness or femaleness). Similarly, in virtual contexts you see more and more mention of ‘sapiosexuality’ – it is the mind, the interpretation of signs, the construction of contexts and scenes, the exchange of gestures and concepts which condition the context for sexual and emotional responses. The mind becomes the primary environment for psycho-social exchange at the same time as the physical context is deemphasized.
## Identity and the System of Repression-Liberation
‘Identity’ is the self expressed as simulacra. It is the self subjected to the processes of production – of being made visible in fixed and definite terms. To express one’s self as an identity means that one is more able to be transmitted as information; one is more able to participate in the marketplaces of identities, be they economic markets or social markets. One’s ‘politics’ for instance is an important part of contemporary identity – ‘identity politics’ is more about fixing one’s social exchange rate in an identity marketplace than it is about any genuine desire to overhaul the system. In this, it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the political grievance and the grievance performed for economic, social and identity-based reasons. The simulation of politics becomes inseperable to politics, even for the actors. The model exists for-itself and replicates itself as something distinct from the situation which it originally mapped.
Identity then is a symptom of the system of production, not a challenge to it. It is a fundamental part of its operation. And it is the nature of the productive system that it produces more and more identities. The political identity (insofar as it claims to be the Good Identity, the True Identity) breaks the cycle of symbolic exchange. It is a necessary feature of identity politics that it exiles and exterminates its opposites. Properly speaking, in functional cycles of symbolic exchange, there should be no power. There should simply be a transference of signs meeting in some resolution. Power emerges (as an oppressive affect) where the symbolic exchange is broken and where one side claims the whole territory for itself. The True Good offers no opportunity for any reply – properly speaking, this is ‘repression’.
*”The fundamental rule of symbolic obligation stipulates that the basis of any form of domination is the total absence of any counterpart, of any return. The unilateral gift is an act of power. And the Empire of the Good, the violence of the Good, is precisely to be able to give without any possible return. This is what it means to be in God’s position. Or to be in the position of the Master who allows the slave to live in exchange for work (but work is not a symbolic counterpart, and the slave’s only response is eventually to either rebel or die).”* (Baudrillard, ‘The Violence of the Global’, 2003)
The productive system therefore creates a matrix – a social space where competing identities fight for the truth. Every exiled nature or taste, including irrational and nonsensical tastes, are compelled to produce their own model of resistance – their own ‘identity’. We call this the system of Repression-Liberation. Every node in the matrix is compelled to liberate itself from other, more dominant and well-connected nodes in the system of truth. In doing so, they ‘oppress’ other nodes in the system and demand new forms of liberation and identity, thus continuing the process.
Source: reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/tkt3jd/dark_immersion_tools_and_concepts_dark