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Audience: In the sense of Winnicott's transitional space, which becomes in general a place where art, culture and symbolic activity take place, my own understanding of it is that there needs to be not only the absent-presence of the other, but actually an engagement with the other where a shared space is created. I wonder if Jenny's room is a real transitional space, she's playing with the other, but with the other as a projected fantasy of her own mind. Even though there's a camera and people ultimately respond, it's not playing really in real time where there's an engagement, where a third is created which then becomes something like cultural experience or art. I'm wondering if she's much more of a narcissist than an exhibitionist.
Burgin: Winnicott discovered the idea of the transitional object before he became an analyst, when he was still a pediatrician, although strictly speaking he wasn't a pediatrician because pediatrics did not exist as a separate specialization of the medical field, until later, as result of his own work. Later on he became an analyst and extended it quite progressively to the point that in his later essays he speaks of the transitional space, quite simply, 'the location of cultural experience', which is a title of one of his later essays. What characterizes the space of cultural experience in Winnicott, and which is why I find it so useful for people interested in cultural production, is that it's precisely the space where the question 'Did I create this or did it come from the outside?' is held in suspension. It's that space of the imaginary where it hasn't yet been decided what side of the line you're on, whether it's psychical reality or commonly-shared real world. It's in-between. I would absolutely agree and that is what I was trying to say. In classic psychoanalytic terms, there has been a regression. This sounds like we're psychoanalyzing Jenny and I have a long footnote which says that this is not the point, it would be absurd from a distance to analyze her. The point is to say there are more ways of understanding her behavior in psychoanalysis than exhibitionism offers. If we were to simply set up a matrix, or a structure of psychoanalytic notions, which is all I'm doing, then you might say that in terms of strictly Freudian analysis that at this point in her life when she's on the verge of adulthood, she's leaving the dorm room, she's going to get a job at National Geographic, she's having her twenty-first birthday, she's reached the age of majority and can make her own decisions, she's leaving the familial space, that there's a regression to that originary leaving the space of the mother. So there's a return of modes of relating to the world that are archaic in purely developmental terms. In a sense she's acting out many of those original moves that she made in the transition from the space of the mother's body. So she's reality-testing. There's a sense of 'What can I get away with?' When the child launches itself from what to it is an impossibly high mountain, like this chair, it's able to do so only because it's contained in its mother's gaze, it knows it can't fall. She's doing the same thing, when she exposes herself, she does this kind of come-on to the camera and gets a violent response from a crazy guy out there. She's able to do this reality-testing because she's under the gaze of the Jennycam, and it seems to me that the camera represented the mother's gaze, maternal and benevolent, and was able to do her reality-testing, what works, what doesn't work, so long as she was held in that gaze.
Audience: I just wonder if that is real play.
Burgin: Who decides what real play is? When are we simply playing at playing and when are we really playing?
Audience: The creation of something new comes out of play, what's the third thing that brought about?
Burgin: The forging of an adult Jenny, who knows that she can't come-on like that to a camera without something nasty happening. She's reinventing herself. A line from Eliot comes to mind, 'in a minute there is time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse'. It's the idea of a continual restructuring of the subject. It's not that you are the person that you are and you mature physically while remaining the same subject, but it's rather every minute you are continually readjusting.
Audience: You mentioned the question in suspension. It's a question which might also be held in suspension in the artistic act, in a relation where someone can't be sure of his own will. What is your insight into your artistic work in relation to this question in suspension? Do you feel something as perhaps coming from outside?
Burgin:I think that almost any form of invention whether it's writing a paper or making an artwork, any way of thinking, if it's going to be creative, has to involve a certain element of risk. That risk comes when you suspend what you know to be the case in the interest of trying to produce in the space between you and the world, something which you do not yet know. For me, in making art I don't know what I'm doing and that's what I value about the process. I can only know that retrospectively, and even then by definition, psychoanalytically speaking, I cannot fully know. This is why it's interesting to hear back from people about what they see on the wall, sometimes they tell you and you say 'My god, did I really put that up there?' There's that sense of entering the space which is risky because it puts in danger those certitudes which carry you from one day to the next and guarantee your continuity as an adult subject in the world. As in psychoanalysis, you open up a space of possibility for reconfiguration of what you already know. So the certitudes become reconfigured and can move on in a different direction. This is something we learn early on in play and it's something that we carry on later in any form of creativity. It can be any aspect of life, it doesn't have to be art.
Audience:I think that it would be interesting to go back and find out if new technology since 1999 has changed her relationship to the camera. Her site is economic-based, and she won't be able to get away with only having one or ten frames a minute. Because of the technology that is available now it would be expected of her to stream. In 1998 it was near impossible to engage in a see-you-see-me relationship. But now it would be interesting to see her response to this demand now that there other Jennies out there, with their Jennycams that are giving this service of interacting. Secondly, what about hidden cameras? Did you consider it in this analysis or have you thought about it? I find that hidden cams are as prevalent as exhibitionist cams.
Burgin: This essay commemorates a moment in time that's already passed. It's a snapshot of a certain state of the technology and of the phenomena generated around that moment. At that time, see-you-see-me offered streaming, albeit rather quite jerky. Jerky came to mind not by accident, because mostly what you were looking at was for guys jerking off! I think it was significant that she was not interested in seeing the people she was seen by. Classically, exhibitionism is in the hope of getting a reciprocal display, it's a trade, and she wasn't interested in it. Certainly lots of other Jennies came online rather quickly, and they all turned out to be professionals whose entire working life consisted in taking off their clothes. Well, it's a job. There are lots of so-called hidden cameras, which again I suspect for the most part to be fakes, put-ons. Nobody's fooled, it's play, again. Kids say, 'Ok, you're Spiderman, I'm the evil genius.' They're saying 'Ok let's pretend that this webcam is in the girl's shower, and you're the evil voyeur…' Nobody believes that this is anything other than a plant, it's a fantasy space. What's sort of sad of course is that we live in a culture where fantasy always has to be bought and sold.
Audience: I know you wrote this to offer an alternative explanation to that of exhibitionism. I'm interested in the fact that the media took an alternative view, it moved the debate towards the exhibitionist end rather than understanding her as a fairly ordinary young kid who happens to have a videocamera, who is playing innocently and is shocked to discover that somebody could take it the wrong way. The media operated almost in an attempt to manipulate the 'superego', to push this idea that this actually something rather abnormal, rather than assimilating it on the end of normal behavior.
Burgin: Media is not interested in normality, it's abnormality that grabs viewers. None of this, as far as I was concerned, was about her motives. I don't know Jennifer, I'm not an analyst, she's not on the couch, so it was a demonstration of method. It was really provoked by indignation that the best one can do with psychoanalytic theory is make those sorts of judgments. It was saying that given the facts that we know, not only what she does but what she says about what she does, her age, her position, then it's equally plausible to construct this kind of a picture. In fact, by implication I'm of course saying that it's not only equally plausible, it's damn more interesting than it is to make that knee-jerk judgment. I'm giving a demonstration of a mode of analysis with the example of Jenny, who as far as I'm concerned is a fictional character. Exhibitionist, wants to be the most popular girl on campus, yes, why not? At different times, different things. At moments maybe it was just sheer exhibitionism. That wasn't the point of the paper. I would say that one has to draw a line when it comes to what Freud called 'wild analysis', actually pretending to analyze people when there's no analytical relation. You can't possibly do that. One has to be clear about what it is that one's trying to do, unlike the media and the so-called experts that they interview, like the psychology professor from the University of Pennsylvania. My god, with professors like that who needs idiots? They're very happy just to move in and say 'This is what she's doing.' It's terribly impertinent and a terrible invasion of her privacy. It's crap, I felt indignant, and that provoked me to write this paper. As a citizen.
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