The Cyborg as a Manifestation of the Cunning of Reason

In the postmodern, the body as a whole has turned into a libidinal object, an object of phantasmatic cathexis, a fantasized object of both economic and libidi-nal investment (for the idea of Betsetzung or cathexis, see Freud 1987d [1900]: 572, 600, 604–612, 622, 1972f [1926]: 120, 204–205; breuer & Freud 1977 [1895]: 92, 107;

Laplanche & Pontalis 1998 [1967]: 92–96; Thwaites 2007: 18–21). In this manner, the postmodern body appears as a dream object of an intensified Ich-Erlebnis, an

“ego-experience,” manifesting the pleasure of the designer body as the project of self-design: the post-body as an object of experimentation following the logic of life in the laboratory. In this context, the ideal of the postmodern subject is not to be, but to have a body which, at the same time, is as efficient and reli-able as the machine-body of an athlete (see Magdalinski 2008: 33–36; Cashmore 2010 [1996]: 36–59; Hoberman 1992; Gebauer 1997, 2006; rail 1998b), and as flex-ible and versatile as the performative body of an actor (Fischer-Lichte & Fleig 2000; Fischer-Lichte 2004) – or rather, as volatile and calculated as the spectacular body of a pop star à la Madonna (cf. schwichtenberg 1993; Miklitsch 1998). This is a body that has an air of being capable of sexual experimentation, a body for which corporeal sensations and affections are free-floating experiences, casual moments of desires and pleasures beyond compulsory categories such as gen-der and sexual identity (in terms of “experimental desire,” see Grosz 1994b).

In short, the post-sexual body is a body receptive of and responsive to experi-ences and expressions of the sexual that follow the logic of the liquid libido, the libido subsumed by the commodity form, the economic basis of productive con-sumption ruling the cultural formation of the postmodern: in the order of neo-Fordism based on an all-pervading imperative of management, the regulative principle determining the lifestyle of global capitalism, whatever the body is as an embodiment of the subject, it is an embodiment of capital as an object and subject of post-sex: the panic body as an incorporation of surplus value. In other words, capi-talism is not only an economic system; it is first and foremost a regime of desire.

Libido: the enigmatic energy of the sexual – libido: the driving force of capital.

This is the logic of the economic order constitutive of productive consumption as the political regime of global capitalism.

No longer is there coercion, but seduction – that is the idea of postmodern capitalism (cf. baudrillard 1990f [1979]).

Polysexuality in the Matrix of Cybersexualities

If sigmund Freud (1981c [1905]: 32, 132–145) long ago deemed it necessary to expand the definition of sexuality on the grounds that, firstly, the sexual and the genital are not the same since there are sexual activities that are not genital, and secondly, sexual pleasure encompasses erogenous zones and practices that have nothing to do with procreation (Freud 1983a [1938/1940]:

74–75, 1986d [1915–1917]: 313–350; cf. bristow 1997: 62–63), what we have now

even goes far beyond what Freud could ever expect to be brought about by extended sexuality. Although genital pleasure and procreation, in their trans-formed forms, still establish a solid basis for heterosexual relations and the whole societal order based on them, embracing what Judith butler (1990: 5, 151) calls the “heterosexual matrix” or “compulsory heterosexuality,”⁴⁸ there is much more that defines the sexual in contemporary culture; the sexual as a dis-cursive construct of imaginary projections typical of the postmodern.

Post-sex is about this “more,” it is about the surplus of the sexual, about a libidinal intensification of the surface of the body, and an excess of meaning ascribed to the sexual in the conduct of life, a mode of life not only encouraged, but expressly demanded by postmodern consumer culture under the imperative of productive consumption (cf. best & Kellner 1997: 103–123; Dunn 1998: 107–141; bauman 2001:

220–236, 2003: 36–57; Featherstone 1991a; Lury 1996), and increasingly by the emergent forms of scientific-technological redesigning of the body, its abilities and capacities, in order to make it conform to the requirements of capital under the regime of the global financial markets (see, for example, shilling 1993: 127–

149; Williams & bendelow 1998: 49–93; Landweer 2002; Wenner 2002; brown 2003;

from a historical perspective in terms of critical theory, see Horkheimer & Adorno 1994 [1944]: 246–250), finally amounting to what John Armitage (2004) calls “the totally mobilized hypermodern body” (cf. Jünger 1980 [1930], 1982 [1932]). All this signifies a mode of body design that, in turn, is reflected by the idea of cybersex as a phantasmatic projection of the imaginary of the technological celebrated by post-theory. What is decisive here is that more than ever real-existing capitalism is not real, it is imaginary: productive consumption as the real precondition of contem-porary capitalism is based on the imaginary of desire (for the idea of the imaginary, see Castoriadis 1998 [1975]; Habermas 1998f [1985]; von braun 2001).⁴⁹

In this sense, the subject of post-sex is compatible with the logic of productive consumption, the logic of the liquid libido, the driving force of the panic body

48 Drawing on the ideas of Monique Wittig and Adrienne rich, butler (1990: 151) explains that the idea of using the term of the “heterosexual matrix” is to “characterize a hegemonic discursive/

epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine express-es female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of hetero-sexuality” (emphasis mine; in terms of primatology, see Haraway 1990). Post-sex, paradoxically, at the same time implies both the consolidating and the questioning of this compulsory heterosexual order.

49 An appropriate description of desire in the context of productive consumption is, for example, Peter Gorsen’s resume of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the “desiring-machine” as an elaboration of what in the theory of avantgarde art is called the “bachelor machine,” machine céli-bataire or Junggesellenmaschine (see reck & szeemann 1999 [1975]): “Deren Theorie der Wunsch-maschinen (machines désiderantes) zielt auf ein von der industriellen Produktion unterdrücktes Triebpotential, auf die produktiven Kräfte der Libido. Obwohl vom industriellen Produktions-system unterdrückt oder zu sakrosankten sublimierungen verurteilt, ist dieses Potential gleich-wohl eine der Grundlagen der industriellen Produktion. Der Kapitalismus produziert seine eige-nen Wider sprüche. einerseits braucht er die libidinöse energie, sexualität und Phantasietätigkeit dringend zur Konpensation gegenüber der erfahrung des entfremdeten Arbeitsprozesses, er schafft sich damit ein triebökonomisches Gleichgewicht. Andererseits aber muß er alles unterdrü-cken, was seinem Verwertungsinteresse nicht subsumierbar ist. er lebt von etwas, was er gleich-zeitig unterdrückt.” (szeemann 1999 [1975]: 4)

distinctive about the political economy of neoliberalism. This is the ideological matrix of cybersex, “sex” in the world of the cyborg.

In a genuinely postmodern manner, the idea of cybersex is an imaginary pro-jection of the real, a phantasmatic reflection of the reality of the prevailing sex-ual condition, in which what Ken Plummer (2003: 527), one of the pioneers of contemporary sexual research, calls the “new body technologies of sexuality”

contribute, in their own ways, to the manner in which “the sexual” is under-stood and experienced today in the constellation of what I refer to as the sex-ual-technological complex of the postmodern.

These new technologies include, at one extreme, how erotic bodies are (and have been for some time) managed through medical interventionism. I think here not only of the long histories of birth control, but of the more recent med-ical interventionism, such as Viagra, that work to engorge the body with eroti-cism; of transgender realignment surgery, which helps refashion the genitalia;

of the new methods of assisted conception (artificial insemination, it vitro fer-tilization, embryo transfer, gamete intra-fallopian transfer), that further discon-nect the acts of sex, reproduction, gestation and childbearing: sexed bodies, genetic bodies, gestating bodies and nurturing bodies; and of the multibillion-dollar cosmetic industry, where the breast, face and body become transformed through medical procedures, often towards a sexual end. (ibid.)

According to Plummer, these are “but instances of technology at work to shift the sexualized body” (ibid.; emphasis mine). referring to the recent research concerning technologies that are used in the medical management of inter-sexuality and sexual dysfunctions, Plummer maintains that the examples given by him are just the “tip of the iceberg” of body altering technologies that also change human sexuality. As a result, the “body is reconstituted for postmodern times and we are entering the age of the post-human and the cyborg” (ibid.).

For Plummer, this also means “new modes of (dis)embodied sexualities such as those found in the rapidly growing world of cybersex” (ibid.). That is:

Through telephone sex, on-line porn, sex chat rooms, web cam erotics, virtual realities, etc., new disembodied sexual worlds may be in the making. Masturba-tion, solitariness and isolation may be one hallmark of such a world. but acces-sibility to sexual imagery on a global scale and a permanent supply of partners is another. (ibid.)

The new constellation of sex and sexuality which Plummer describes here viv-idly exemplifies my idea of the sexual-technological complex of the postmod-ern in which the real and the imaginary intermingle with one another – as we can see also in Plummer’s own presentation.

For Plummer, the postmodern condition of the sexual is not only about real practices and acts of pleasure that deviate from the modern paradigm of the sexual in that they no longer have anything to do with procreation and hetero-normality, but also – and perhaps predominantly – postmodern sex and sexu-ality are about discursive figures in the form of narratives, of which “cybersex stories” are typical examples (Plummer 1997: 74). While the reality of cybersex is about “masturbation or solosex” (ibid.), cybersex is in the story world of the

postmodern a latter-day derivation of science fiction; that is, a post-theoretical theory-fiction (academia) and a post-sexual phantasm (popular culture) in the realm of the imaginary constitutive of the postmodern.

“sex” in terms of the “cyber” is about what sadie Plant (1998: 30), the prima inter pares of cyberfeminism, calls “high-technology sex.” According to Plant, this new kind of sexual experience is commonly held up as the “epitome of disem-bodied pleasure, contact-free sex without secretions in a zone of total auton-omy” (ibid.). For her, indeed, it is all of that; but it is actually even more: “high-technology sex” takes place in a “safe environment free from the side-effects and complications of actual intercourse: transmittable diseases, conceptions, and abortions, and the sad obligations of emotional need”; that is, cybersex or techno-sex is a “closed circuit, a sealed elsewhere, a virtual space to be accessed at will” (ibid.; in terms of “replicunts,” cf. Plant 1996b: 181–183); in other words, a postmodern retro-fiction of the Foucauldian idea of “other spaces” constituting the realm of heterotopia (see Foucault 1999a [1967/1984]; cf. siebers 1994a), a realm of “otherness” reinterpreted in terms of technological post-sex.

As we can see, “sex” in the world of the “cyber” exceeds all the limits and limi-tations of conventional sexual encounters in the flesh. Whatever you want in your wildest dreams, it is there for you, virtually, in the imaginary universe of cyberspace and the cyborg in which, as Haraway (1991f: 249) says, “prosthesis becomes a fundamental category for understanding our most intimate selves.”

In this postmodern artificial paradise, a paradise of technological simulacra, we can experience the future already present; according to Plant:

[…] cybersex is well advanced: the hardware is fetishized, the software is porn, and vast proportions of the telecommunications system are consumed by erot-ica. but these are merely the most overt – and perhaps the least interesting – examples of a generalized degeneration of “natural” sex. As hard and wetwares collapse onto soft, far stranger mutations wrack the sexual scene. The simula-tion of sex converges with the deregulasimula-tion of the entire sexual economy, the corrosion of its links with reproduction, and the collapse of its specificity: sex disperses into drugs, trance, and dance possession; androgyny, hermaphro-ditism, and transsexualism become increasingly perceptible; paraphilia, body engineering, queer sex, and what Foucault calls “the slow motion of pleasure and pain” of sM […] (Plant 1998: 30; cf. Chun 2006: 11–15, 77–127, 243–244; Fou-cault 1990e [1984]; Morton 1995; Gargett 2002, 2003)

Forget the conventional paraphernalia of sM: whips and chains, leather and rubber (see, for example, Hart 1998; Henkin & Holiday 2003 [1996]; Lang-dridge & barker 2007)⁵⁰ – we are now visiting the pleasure dome of

cyber-50 According to the prevailing conception, a sadomasochistic act is a consensual sexual prac-tice that consists of a power constellation of dominance and submission, inflicting pain that is experi-enced as pleasure, stageing fantasy scenarios and role-playing, deliberate humiliation of participants in the object position (“top”/“bottom”), fetishistic paraphernalia (whips, handcuffs, chains, leather and rubber cloths), and various ritualistic activities (whipping, bondage, blind-folding). In sM sex, all the characteristics that constitute heterosexual sex are disrupted and thus transgression is the hard core of sadomasochism (see, for example, edwards 1994: 74–88; sullivan 2003: 151–167; Kleinplatz & Moser 2006; for a Foucauldian perspective, see, for example, simons 1995: 99–101; bersani 1996: 79–99; ball 2003: 212–214; for the idea of “otherness” in terms of transgression, see, for example, Jervis 1999).

sex in which you can enjoy sex in virtual reality by means of the prosthetic organs of the cyborg (cf. Annesley 1998: 28–29; Metcalf 1998: 112; Gray 2001:

193–195; Mitchell 2005: 309–335; smith-Windsor 2008: 280; Wilson 1995; Whitt 2008; in terms of organ transplantation or “organ transfer,” cf. sharp 2009; for the cultural-historical context in terms of “American bodies,” see Armstrong 1996; Johnston 2001b). Indeed, it is not enough that one is feminist, one has to be cyberfeminist to be able to understand all the extraordinary subtleties of the exclusive forms of pleasure enabled by prosthetics and the cyborg (cf., for example, eubanks 2004: 155–159; Hartmann 2004: 37–38, 48–57; Nayar 2004:

283–308; bergermann 1998, 2002a, 2002b, 2004; sollfrank 1998, 2002; Weber 2001; Angerer et al. 2002; reiche & sick 2002; reiche & Kuni 2004; Volkart 2006;

for Lara Croft as an embodiment of cyberfeminist theory/power fantasies, see, for example, Weber 2002: 135–144; Cannon 2006: 161–172; Lenzhofer 2006:

188–196; Genz & brabon 2009: 154–155; Nayar 2010: 40–42, 48–50; Deuber-Mankowsky 2001). As Haraway (1991a: 151) says, the “cyborg is resolutely com-mitted to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity.”⁵¹ And therefore, there are no limits whatsoever for sexual experience. In the world of the “cyber,” as Plant (1997b: 46) assures us, “one individual can become a population explosion on the Net: many sexes, many species” (cf. stone 1994b [1991]: 106–109; Wajcman 2004: 56–77).

Or, as elizabeth Grosz (1995c: 184) elaborates on the figure of “tiny sex” in the context of “perverse desire,” reiterating the Deleuze-Guattarian idea of

“becoming” in a Derridean manner (see Deleuze & Guattari 2000 [1980]: 213;

Derrida 2000 [1988]): to “become-animal” or to “become-woman” does not involve “imitating, reproducing or tracing” the “animal” or “woman”; rather, it involves entering in relation with a “third term,” a “machine,” in order to form a machinic assemblage composed of “animal components” (cf. Derrida 2002c). In this manner, “becoming”

[…] is not a question of being (-animal, -woman, -lesbian), of attaining a defi-nite status as a thing, a permanent fixture, nor of clinging to, having an identity, but of moving, changing, being swept beyond one singular position into a mul-tiplicity of flows, or what Deleuze and Guattari have described as a “thousand tiny sexes”: to liberate the myriad of flows, to proliferate connections, to inten-sify. (Grosz 1995c: 184; cf. Grosz 1994a)

51 One can, of course, see the cyborg from a different perspective, in terms of the sublime constitutive of the radical transformation of being human effected by new technologies; as rob Wilson explains, referring to the social and cultural upheavals shattering the inherited certainties in urban conditions: “If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the ‘now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through the violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.” (Wilson 1994: 290) What Wilson says here, of course, is fantastic; but what exactly he is saying remains more than unclear. This is the fascination effected by the “post”: it is about language in which excessive signification has taken the place of meaning.

A thousand tiny sexes – that is the extraordinary mode of sexual pleasure effected by the “cyber,” a way to “polysexuality, a multiplicity of nongendered sexes” (Potts 2002: 252), post-sexual pleasures in terms of the cyborg: “cyborg

‘sex’” (Haraway 1991a: 150; cf. Žižek 2000: 65–66) in the free zones of “cyber-sexualities” (Wolmark 1999a; Kirkup et al. 2000). In other words, cybersex not only means “polysexuality” (Peraldi 1997 [1981]), but definitely more than that:

sexual desires and pleasures in the world of the “cyber” manifest multisexual sexualities as a myriad of flows (cf. Apter 1999: 160–166). In this world, nothing is impossible any longer; even, as rob Wilson (2000 [1996]: 314) says (referring to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), “feminized cyborgs can be turned” into “pleasure machines for scopophilic desire like so many pastoral sheep chewing on the grasses in a transnational limbo.”

Cybersex as a Continuation of Masturbation by Other Means

This is the world of the cyborg: “animal,” “woman” and “machine” are now self-replicating components that constitute a global multiplicity of Hara-wayan “post-gender” sexualities (cf. Haraway 1991a: 150); a world in which

“sex” is not about the Freudian Wiederkehr des Verdrängten, “return of the repressed” (see, for example, Freud 1977e [1896]: 387, 389, 1990d [1911]: 310, 1991b [1915]: 257–258, 1972f [1926], 1987e [1920]; Laplanche & Pontalis 1998 [1967]: 631–632), but, instead, it follows the logic of Deleuze-Guattarian

“becoming” (cf. braidotti 1994a, 1994b, 2002, 2006) as a never-ending mul-tiplication of differences in the manner of Derridean différance (see Derrida 1982 [1972]: 24–33, 39–47, 1984a [1972/1968]), and, by that, becomes a mani-festation of the Nietzschean ewige Wiederkunft (see Nietzsche 1968a [1883–

1885]: 270–272, 1969b [1888–1889/1908]: 333–335, 1973a [1882/1887]: 250; cf.

Heidegger 1998a [1961]: 225–256, 283–290, 354–360), “eternal return,” in the sense of what Nietzsche (1969d [1889]: 154) calls die Psychologie des Orgias-mus, the “psychology of orgiasm” (for a contextualization in contemporary terms, see Ansell Pearson 1991, 1997).⁵²

Approaching cyberspace from the standpoint of French feminist philosophy and especially the ideas of Luce Irigaray and écriture féminine (see, for example,

52 In Ecce homo, Nietzsche (1969b [1888–1889/1908]: 333) sums up the basic idea of Also sprach Zarathustra: “Die Grundconception des Werkes” is “der Ewige-Wiederkunft-Gedanke, diese höchste Formel der bejahung, die überhaupt erreicht werden kann”; “the highest formula of affir-mation,” this is the idea of the “eternal return” constitutive of Nietzsche’s philosophical vitalism:

beyond the human and time we have the possibility to encounter the cyclical becoming of life in its intrinsic fullness the culmination of which is an ecstatic mode of existence experienced as

“the psychology of orgiasm”; as Nietzsche (1969c [1889]: 154) explains in Götzen-Dämmerung:

“Die Psychologie des Orgiasmus als eines überströmenden Lebens- und Kraftgefühls, innerhalb dessen selbst der schmerz noch als stimulans wirkt [...]. Das Jasagen zum Leben selbst noch in seinen fremdesten und härtesten Problemen, der Wille zum Leben, im Opfer seiner höchsten Typen der eignen Unerschöpflichkeit frohwerdend – das nannte ich dionysisch, das erriet ich als die brücke zur Psychologie des tragischen Dichters. Nicht um von schrecken und Mitleiden loszukommen, nicht um sich von einem gefährlichen Affekt durch dessen vehemente entladung zu reinigen – so verstand es Aristoteles –: sondern um, über schrecken und Mitleid hinaus, die ewige Lust des Werdens selbst zu sein, – jene Lust, die auch noch die Lust am Vernichten in sich schließt […].”

Moi 1985: 89–172; Felski 1989: 19–21, 33–54; Grosz 1989; Oliver 2000; Oliver &

Walsh 2004), Cathryn Vasseleu (1997 [1994]) elaborates on a theory of “virtual bodies” representing a desire for a virtualization of corporeality in cyberspace.

Drawing on Howard rheingold’s (1991: 346–353) vision of “teledildonics” and a “full-body data suit,” that is, the Ur-idea of cybersex (cf., for example, White 1994: 324; springer 1996: 82–83; Case 1997: 177–179; Calcutt 1998: 109–111;

Cavallaro 2000: 128; Lunenfeld 2000a: 90–93; Grosz 2001: 40–45, 76; Mittag 2001: 113), Vasseleu (1997: 52–56) suggests that cyberspace entails a dissolving of the separation between the organic and the machinic, between the body and a prosthetic apparatus encapsulating the subject, and finally results in the disappearance of the border line between the interior and the exterior.

Thus, cyberspace enables an entirely new form of sexual pleasure that

Thus, cyberspace enables an entirely new form of sexual pleasure that