Commodification of the Body and Sexual Prosthetics

As a result of the transformation outlined above, “sex” has become a univer-sal currency in the globalized world of commodities and consumption (see, for example, evans 1993: 36–64; Fine 2002: 73–77, 88–98, 122; Haug 1971, 1987 [1971], 2003, 2005; Morton 1995; Altman 2001; Adams & Pigg 2005; Gibson-Gra-ham 2006 [1996]; Padilla et al. 2007); a language of desires and pleasures that

expresses the seductive power of the “sexual” that in itself is as enigmatic as it is alluring. reified through commodification, sexual desires and pleasures consti-tute global “sexscapes” as a transnational form of “corporeal politics,” a “global-ized economy of sex,” to transpose elina Penttinen’s (2008: 15–57) concepts from the specific area of prostitution and sex-trafficking to the realm of consumption in general (cf. Appadurai 1996). In this manner, the imaginary of “sex” manifests the reality of capital, its power to turn desires and pleasures into surplus value, to appropriate and expropriate the sensations and affections of the body. In other words, the sexual economy of the postmodern implies both the economization of sex and the sexualization of economy. This, in short, is the idea of post-sex: sex as a simulation of itself, sexual desires and pleasures as an evocative conglomeration of postmodern phantasms of unbounded hedonism, consumer-oriented wish-images of the empowerment of the subject by means of “sex.”

Thus, in the condition of the postmodern, under the disciplinary regime of the commodity form, the prevailing cultural climate, the whole sensory environ-ment produced and displayed by productive consumption constituting the libidinal economy of neo-Fordism, is dominated by all-pervasive “hypersexu-alization” (Poulin & Claude 2010). This is a situation which baudrillard (1983b [1981]: 36) already saw coming into being in the early 1980s in the emerging order of simulation: “[n]ot so long ago sex and work were savagely opposed terms: today both are dissolved into the same type of demand” (cf. Poster 1993a). What is this demand? It is the demand of capital: intensification of work in order to radicalize consumption.

From Sexual Liberalism to the Libidinal Economy of Neo-Fordism

If this is a situation in which we can enjoy the freedom of existence in a free world, this is, at the same time, a situation in which to be an “individual” is an extremely precarious matter: the subject, as a post-subject, is a me, myself and I that can never be sure what it is. As a result, paradoxically, to be a subject one has to construct oneself all the time anew: work upon oneself is hard work in the world of the “post” (cf., for example, sarup 1996; McKenzie 2001; Gimlin 2002).

According to Anthony elliott and Charles Lemert (2006), due to globalization, we are now living in a world characterized by a “new individualism,” a cultural situ-ation in which the promotion of personal well-being is the guiding value of pre-vailing morality. In other words, a strong ego pursuing individual interests is the ideal of contemporary culture, even at the emotional costs for oneself and oth-ers. In terms of the sexual, this situation implies what the authors call “individual-ist arts of sex” (ibid.: 107–132); that is, highly idiosyncratic sexual proclivities and practices. At the same time, during the last two decades, “psychoanalytical femi-nists, deconstructiofemi-nists, post-structuralists and postmodernists” have “widened the debate over sex and sexuality to a broader concern with, amongst others, issues of the body and its pleasures, repressed desire, multiple identities, new cultural techniques of sexual surveillance as well as cybersex” (ibid.: 115).

All this constitutes what I designate as the ego-politics of the postmodern subject;

that is, a postmodern derivation of what Félix Guattari (1977 [1974]) calls the

“micropolitics of desire” (cf. Genosko 2002: 10–17, 87–91, 111–123; busk 2001; for a historical contextualization from the perspective of the événements of May 1968 in Paris, see Wolin 2010; in terms of the Foucauldian “aesthetics of exis-tence,” cf. Foucault 1990a [1984]; with regard to “the cultivation of the self” in Antiquity, cf. Foucault 1990h [1984]: 39–68, 1990i [1984]; Marti 1999 [1988]: 131–

138; Kögler 2004 [1994]: 161–176; Lemke 1997: 269–294; schmid 1994 [1987]; in terms of the “hermeneutics of the self,” cf. Visker 1991b: 107–113).

In my reading of Guattari, this implies a radical liberation of desire as a mode of politics in which the sexual body has taken the place of the working body;

a pragmatic self-promotion as a relentless individualism reflecting the collec-tive ecstasy of commodified bodies, a post-sexual delirium of the postmodern mediascape, all of this implying a post-political utopianism (cf. sargisson 1996;

berthoud 2007; in terms of feminist utopianism, cf. bammer 1991). This notwith-standing, more than ever, the working body in the postmodern is a necessary precondition of the consuming body with its desires and pleasures (cf. Falk 1994; Turner 1997 [1984]; bauman 1998; shilling 2005); but what is specific now, however, is that the meaning of sex and sexuality has a similar value in the postmodern as work in the modern: the presentation of the self in terms of the sexual is the cultural code, the over-determining metacode (cf. Hebdige 1988:

85–87), of the way of life based on productive consumption. In these terms,

“sex,” to apply barthes’s (1979b [1957]: 115) idea, is a “total term,” a “global sign,”

of the postmodern, and, in this precise barthesian sense, a postmodern “myth”:

desires and pleasures constitutive of postmodern culture are resignified by the second-order signifiers of the sexual, by the signifiers of “sex,” which, as a dis-cursive figure, is a “free-floating signifier” in itself.

In this sense, the postmodern speaks the language of the sexual, the language of libidinal intensities organized by the commodity form.

Thus, as we can see, the sexual and the economic interpenetrate in the post-modern in the same manner as language and desire intertwine with one another, and what enables this promiscuous intimacy is the libidinal language of the “post.” This is what I call the suprematism of the signifier distinctive of post-theory; that is, a specific form of linguistic idealism, an immanent tran-scendentalism of language, the immaterial materialism of the linguistic figura-tion as a non-representafigura-tional mode of writing in the sense of écriture constitu-tive of the theoretical configuration of the “post”; a discursive regime in which the “post” operates as the super-signifier in the manner of what roman Jakob-son (1987 [1935]: 41–43), in his theory of literary language, called “dominant.” In terms of economy, this is the logic of what I designate as the liquid libido, the driving force of financial capitalism as the economic order of productive con-sumption, the cultural matrix of the panic body.

In these terms, contemporary capitalism, in and by its celebration of excess and surplus value, is the greatest liberator of desire. This is the liberty of capital, the libertinage of consumption, which constitutes the basis of the postmodern, its hard core in the precise sense of the term.

It is in this constellation that post-sex, as the condition of possibility of cybersex, becomes intelligible in its full significance. While post-sex is an index of capital, cybersex is its imaginary extrapolation in terms of the imaginary of the technological.

As an open question, the sexual is, at the same time, an issue of individual inti-macy and a public concern today. We are now living in a world in which, as rainer emig (2004: 106) says, “sado-masochist practices and cybersex” are “topics of polite conversation and oral and anal sex common household features.” sex and sexuality, indeed, are no longer issues defined by heterosexual “normality” and considered as such to be only a private matter, or a question of tolerance towards

“sexual minorities.” No, since what was once “deviant” is now “normal,” provided, of course, that it complies with some of the various norms that are constitutive of the new normalities, the different “posts” in terms of the “sexual.” And what com-plicates the contemporary constellation of the “sexual” even more is that in the plurality of differences, peculiar to the postmodern, it is extremely difficult to be different since difference in itself can currently be understood only in terms of dif-férance and, accordingly, dealt with as an issue of différend: if difference is beyond definition, then, what precisely is the difference that makes the difference?

In short, if to be queer is normal today, what is “queer” about being queer in this situation (cf. emig 2000: 211–222) – what can it be, in the strong sense of the word? Mutatis mutandis, this question implies another one: what is it to be

“hetero” in a world in which nothing is “normal” any more? In other words, is the “sexual” today a conceptual impossibility, and, in the final analysis, a Der-ridean “non-concept” (see Derrida 1982 [1972])?

Whatever the answers to these questions might be, it is clear that, paradoxi-cally, in spite of its “self-evidence,” all that is sexual in contemporary culture has become a contested issue, a matter of complicated and contradictory con-troversies (see, for example, Weeks 1995a; Lancaster & di Leonardo 1997; segal 1997; Hirshman & Larson 1998; in terms of “sex wars,” see Duggan & Hunter 1995), precisely because there are so many “normalities” now, each “normal” in their very difference manifesting the never-ending dissemination of différance as the logic of contemporary culture under the sign of the “post.”

This transformation of culture in terms of sex and sexuality, however, is not an invention of today; it already began half a century ago in the name of “sexual rights” (Hawkes 2004: 146; for an overview of sexual controversies at the time, see Gordon & Libby 1976). In the America of the 1960s, during the tumultuous decade that brought about civil rights and anti-war movements as well as the hippies and the counterculture (see, for example, roszak 1969; Harman 1988; Far-ber 1994; FarFar-ber & bailey 2001; braunstein & Doyle 2002; Carlisle & Golson 2007),

those who had been “marginalized, ignored or stigmatized” raised their voices to demand the recognition of various sexual modes of being (Hawkes 2004: 146).

Thus, women, the young, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals mobilized their sexuality and sexual identity in opposition to the heteronormative and male-prioritizing orthodoxy. Campaigners for sexual liberation began to dis-engage heterosexuality from traditional associations with marriage, the fam-ily, reproduction and the “happy home.” They also claimed that sexual diver-sity had equal validity for the attainment of personal satisfaction and freedom of choice. (ibid.)

What came out of this liberatory mobilization was a “sexual politics” pursued within “four key movements”: “second-wave feminism, radical left-wing poli-tics, black liberation and lesbian and gay liberation” (ibid.).

However, by the 1980s, the optimism of sexual affirmation of the 1960s was swept away by the horror of AIDs, community feeling was displaced by com-petitive individualism, and the freedom of choice was replaced by market liberalism. As a result, the “last feature of the twentieth century was the com-modification of sex and its pleasures in ways that connected the spheres of profitability and of self-identity” (ibid.: 147). Thus, as Gail Hawkes summarizes the closure of the twentieth century as a “sexual century,” it laid down the

“foundation of a new sexual order for the new millennium” (ibid.). What was once considered “special and mystical became mundane as the commercial world increasingly drew on aspects of sexuality to sell commodities” (ibid.).

The sexual experience was presented as free-floating and malleable, as varied and disposable as the products that it was used to sell. sexual desires and plea-sures were disintegrated from the body and offered instead as a flexible and fluid “wardrobe” of self-expression. (ibid.: 147–148)

This is the point of departure in terms of the sexual in the present study: the paradigm of post-sex. That is, the commodification of sex, the conversion of the sexual liberalism of the 1960s to the market liberalism of the 1980s under the sign of “sex,” is the context of the postmodern sexual pluralism at the out-set of the third millennium (see, for example, Guillebaud 2001 [1998]: 94–148;

eder 2002: 212–225; Muchembled 2008 [2005]: 275–342; edwards 1994; richard-son 1996, 2000; Jackrichard-son 1999; Plummer 2002a, 2002b; for a historical contextu-alization in terms of desire, see birken 1988), even in its most consequent form, sexual radicalism as a politics of desires and pleasures beyond the heteronor-mative order (see, for example, Weeks 1995b [1985]: 4–5, 15–21, 56–57, 186–187, 1997a [1981]: 115–116; Davidson & Taylor 2005: 90–98; rubin 1984; bright 1990, 1992; Abelove et al. 1993; bell 1994; Califia 1994; siegel 2000; Johnson 2002;

from a historical perspective, see, for example, Garton 2004: 16–28, 103–122, 156–167, 218–228; Weeks 2007: 75–93; robinson 1969; Jackson 1994; Passet 2003; in terms of “compulsory sexuality,” cf. shannon 2006: 109–126).

That is, “the sexual” is a central phantasm of the libidinal economy of neo-Ford-ism; an extremely ambiguous and polymorphous figure of desires and

plea-sures manifesting the logic of neoliberalism: the “freedom” of the body under the conditions of the commodity form.

The Iteration of the Sexual: The Repetition of the Code

In the economic regime of productive consumption, the sexual body, in the expanded form of the consuming body, is the necessary precondition of the working body (see bauman 1998: 23–41, 2000: 72–90, 2002: 180–200; in terms of the consuming body as the body of desire, see Falk 1994: 93–150). As before, human work and the working body constitute the only source of value and thus the condition of possibility of capital; what is new, however, is that the working body is now produced by the consuming body: without consumption there is no reproduction in neoliberal capitalism. Thus, the reproduction of both labour force and surplus value are predicated upon productive consumption in the libidinally intensified economy of the postmodern; this is the “sexual reason” of postmodern capitalism (see baudrillard 1990g [1979]: 152–162; for the postmod-ern body as “the mass grave of signs,” cf. baudrillard 1993b [1976]: 101–121).

For this reason, the intensification of desires and pleasures is the most important prerequisite of the survival of capitalism in its contemporary form. This is the eco-nomic necessity of circulating and recycling “sex” in the political economy of neoliberalism. In short, without “sex” capitalism would collapse.

Accordingly, a comprehensive sexualization of culture has taken place in the contemporary Western world to the extent that the present way of life has entirely become “sexed up” (Attwood 2006). As a result, to be a sexual subject implies being a “sexual citizen” (evans 1993) in the postmodern body politic as the contemporary form of “civil society,” the libidinal economy of productive consumption (cf. O’Neill 1995: 126–129), dominated by the promotion of a spe-cific body consciousness; that is, the sensibility of one’s own body as a vehicle of “good life,” the body as the very basis of feeling oneself as a self. In other words, in Western culture, the sexual subject as a sexualized self is living under the “tyranny of pleasure” (Guillebaud 2001 [1998]), sex defined in terms of “sex.”

If, in these terms, the commodifying and patenting of life is already everyday reality in biotech industries (see, for example, Agostino & Ashton 2007; somsen 2007), it would not be surprising if one day sex in the mode of “sex” could be elaborated to a postmodern trade mark, a label, if only some manufacturer of consumer goods, operating as a global player, would be clever enough to reg-ister “sex” by a copyright claim in order to turn “sex” into a global brand: sex™.

In other words, we are already living in a world in which, as Haraway (1997: 12) says, “[l]ife itself is life enterprised up”; that is, life is now “flowing through the multinational channels of capital in which species acquire the status of brand names” (Zylinska 2005: 144; cf. strathern 1992: 31–43; Haraway 1997: 70, 76, 102, 168, 245, 2008b: 139, 151–152; Hayden 1998: 197–198; Franklin & roberts 2006:

78; Wajcman 2004: 88–92). And, in these new circumstances, what has been turned into commodity is, as always in the economy of capitalism, disposable

in the end: planned obsolescence, as the constitutive logic of the commodity form, is essential to capitalism, and it is thus the driving force, the intrinsic logic, of the sexual economy under the sign of the “post”: in the postmodern, “sex,”

by the necessity of the economic imperative, is invented anew over and over again.

In the world of what Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein (1994: 66–70) call

“pancapitalism,” nothing is impossible any longer; at the same time, everything has now become ephemeral.

This is the “post” of the postmodern in terms of the imaginary; and, as we will see later on, the condition of possibility of all that is “cyber.”

Then again, whether this kind of obsessive sexualization of the Western way of life will continue or not (cf. Guillebaud 2001; sigusch 2005), as far as the ambi-guities of the sexual in contemporary culture are concerned, it has become topical in a new way, as Michel Foucault (1990k: 159) declared in the 1970s, to

“consider the possibility that one day, perhaps, in a different economy of bodies and pleasures, people will no longer quite understand how the ruses of sexual-ity, and the power that sustains its organization, were able to subject us to that austere monarchy of sex” (emphasis mine), or, as it is in the original, cette austère monarchie du sexe (Foucault (1994a [1976]: 211; cf. Halperin 2002a: 22–29).³⁶ That is, the question is as to whether what is perceived and enjoyed as freedom, in fact, implies control (cf. Deleuze 1992b [1990]), a mode of control that by far exceeds the mechanisms of control deployed in the world of the modern.

From this perspective, I will be arguing that for some three decades Western – that is, consumer-oriented – society has produced a postmodern body culture, a cult of excessive “bodyism,” that has given rise to a new order of the sexual, the constellation of post-sex as the glorification of the libidinal body, its pre-sumably unending desires and pleasures. The postmodern body cult is a novel disciplinary regime under the power of global capitalism: the body in itself is now a source and expression of personal “capital”; the body as an individual investment, the body as a productive asset of the self: the body as an embodi-ment of the libidinal economy engendered by market forces (cf. Lyotard (1993 [1974]; best & Kellner 1991: 152–155; Denzin 1991: 107–124; Pronger 2002: 201–

36 It is appropriate to notice that what is rendered as “sex” in the english translation of Fou-cault (1990) is not equivalent to the original le sexe (FouFou-cault 1994a [1976]), neither to the Ger-man translation der Sex (Foucault 1983a [1976]). While, in French, le sexe refers to both the genital organs and what is termed as “gender” in contemporary (academic) english, and also nowadays, as an effect of the American english usage of the word “sex,” to sexual acts or sexual practices, in contrast, in German der Sex embraces first and foremost forms of sexual desires and pleasures, but confusingly enough, also das Geschlecht which, in turn, is only partly equivalent to english gender (cf. German translator’s remark in Foucault 1983a: 14). In short, reading Foucault in French, english and German, in fact, one is reading three different books. Moreover, Foucault never says explicitly when he is speaking of sex in the meaning of gender (or das Geschlecht) and when in the sense of sexual acts and practices (cf. Visker 1991b: 176). As a result, Foucault’s main idea, his attempt to abolish what he calls the “repressive hypothesis,” remains very ambiguous: does he mean sex as gender or sex as experiences and expressions of sexual desires and pleasures? In short, is Fou-cault’s Histoire de la sexualité about sex or gender, or both?

206). This, for me, is the “new individualism” under the regime of globalization (cf. elliott & Lemert 2006).

That is, your body is your corporate identity, an identity that is not your own: your body is an incorporation of capital, an incarnation of surplus value.

In terms of the disciplinization of the body, there is nothing as efficient as capital. This is

In terms of the disciplinization of the body, there is nothing as efficient as capital. This is