#- DETERMINATION FROM THE OUTSIDE: STIGMATA TELEDILDONICS AND REMOTE CYBERSEX

[stargir1z]

DETERMINATION FROM THE OUTSIDE: STIGMATA, TELEDILDONICS, AND REMOTE CYBERSEX  by bogna konior

[anarchist-caravan]

And if your lover is in no particular place? Our bodies today are spread over a number of apps, each limb tended to by another wireless device, a piece of a body on the phone, a recording of a body on a website. A disembodied voice on your lover’s smart watch. The body needs to be pieced together like a puzzle across all of our appliances. Stimulation comes from everywhere, each street brimming with erotic possibilities if seen through an app that scans the metropolis for willing partners, human or machine. Coitus is never the only way to experience it; in fact, we are talking here about the erotic superposition of bodies, cities, and tools. Longdistance relationships are normalised on volatile markets, where working commitments take precedence over romantic needs and our true loyalty is, in the end, to our own pleasure and fulfilment, and to capital. A growing number of women in monogamous longdistance relationships live like nuns, experiencing erotics from the outside, disembodied and spectral rather than with a flesh-and-blood partner. Some prefer technical erotics and await the arrival of sex robots. Machines spread our phantom bodies over the globe, opening it up to titillation, annihilation, de-subjectification, livestreaming us. Sexuality needs to adapt. Paul Virilio was enraged by this kind of erotics allowed by remote-control tools, writing that --what was till now still “vital”, copulation, suddenly becomes optional, turning into the practice of remote-control masturbation /…/ [Current] innovations /…/ have actually managed to interrupt coitus, to short-circuit conjugal relations between opposite sexes, with the aid of biocybernetic (teledildonics) accoutrements using sensoreffectors distributed over the genital organs. -- Old-school Freudian paranoia? If coitus and ejaculation, the disposal of possible life inside someone who has the power to actually make it, are the only thing that allows men to get on with their lives without obsessing about death, the withdrawing of this option calls for a proper meltdown. In a psychoanalytic reading, men, themselves not able to give life, are forever reduced to hysterically wanting to deposit it into women, who can reverse death and therefore give some order to chaos. But our bodies are becoming detached from their reproductive function, oriented towards remote pleasures and pains rather than procreation. This is why in Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire , Luciana Parisi welcomes ways of thinking about sexuality beyond human sexual reproduction, beyond the obsession with renewal and the fear of death, and towards a paradigm of sexuality where humans are just one cog in the machine of erotics. Bacteria, technologies, humans, all splitting themselves, scattering themselves in the information age, re-defining  erotics to mean dissolution. // What is our inhuman determinant today, the one that dissolves us according to its own plans? It’s the market itself. Parisi’s optimism around distributed sex contrasts with contemporary takes on networked, fluid societies ordered by the inhuman logic of the economy that has no regard for human needs (or lives). Some say this fluidity has become an even tighter form of control than the old, hierarchical model of God presiding over the affairs of men. Of many ways in which we’d expected the “cyberspace” to revolutionise sexuality, apps like Tinder augment the physical space, providing an available lover at your fingertips. As Solange Manche writes, this is not about freeing people from social conventions, but synchronising them with the erotic pulse of the economy:                                                                          --If my only desire, and thus my whole being [under neoliberalism], is to be an efficient employee, I have to move with the rhythm of capital accumulation. I have to become liquid myself if I am to mobilize for capital. I have to always be available and always ready to respond to the fluctuations of the market. Tinder, then, allows me to function as the perfect employee in a liquid market. I can choose to have sex at moments that do not hamper me [as a worker].-- Capital, an inhuman determination from the outside, although (maybe) started by us, produces alien erotic effects in our bodies. We could imagine that teledildonics could become a way to validate the fact that volatile markets often draw couples apart, making it the new normal that we do not have “body to body” encounters with our lovers. “What’s the problem if you can have sex with them online?” your boss asks, annoyed when you try to negotiate a contract that would let you move your partner to a new place of work. In this way, long-reach teledildonics could be to long-distance relationships what mindfulness workshops are to precarious contracts. You can now prioritise being a good worker without worrying about choosing a job over the relationship—in the end, you can still enjoy wireless intimacy with your lover. ----                                                                                                                                       But the real potential of teledildonics is not as mediators of our increasingly fraught relationships with other humans. Thus far, the markets re-route human desire within detached, scattered, fluid but still recognisable forms. We’re one leg in, one leg out. But how long until capital truly has the remote, until what humans had started ends up somewhere that they could not have predicted? What if these signals could be automated or activated by a different than human intelligence? How many times do you need to have sex with a machine to stop caring who its operator is and start caring for the machine itself? In 2019, another Faustyna waits for the input. Her lover is not Jesus. Her lover is capital, making her body volatile, fluid, scattered across remote control devices. “With Him I go to work, with Him I go for recreation, with Him I suffer, with Him I rejoice; I live in Him and He in me. I am never alone, because He is my constant companion. He is present to me at every moment.” Something else is making love to all of us now.

Bogna Konior - DETERMINATION FROM THE OUTSIDE: STIGMATA, TELEDILDONICS AND REMOTE CYBERSEX - 

[xennnnnnnn]

“Writers who explicitly wanted to advance lesbian erotics, such as Monique Wittig or Jeanette Winterson, also dealt with such technologies of dissolution. Winterson: “Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon’s wall.” Wittig: “Each drop of your blood spurt from your arteries striking m/y arteries vibrates through m/e.” For them, intense desire dissolves us, disassembles our body, and this is good. Like Faustyna, they like taking clichés such as I can’t live without you to extremes, allowing love to disrupt basic constructions such as agency or the self. If you follow someone to the end of the world because you love them, well, the potential for violent transformation is there. Something might collapse. The chain of causality shakes in its foundation. Stigmata is one body channelling another, falling apart, reassembling.”

Bogna Konior, Determination from the Outside: Stigmata, Teledildonics and Remote Cybersex (ŠUM#12)

[stargir1z]

DETERMINATION FROM THE OUTSIDE: STIGMATA, TELEDILDONICS, AND REMOTE CYBERSEX by bogna konior

[xennnnnnnn]

“Stigmata is a model for media like teledildonics because it allows us to think about sensations like pain and pleasure caused by a determination from the outside. What is thinking about technology if not thinking about an inhuman determination from the outside acting on humans even though it was humans who initially produced it? In the past, the determination from the outside was God, a force beyond human affairs even if humans originally gave birth to it. Faustyna had sex with the man in the clouds. Today, we are having sex with the cloud and our stigmata are wireless.”

Bogna Konior, Determination from the Outside: Stigmata, Teledildonics and Remote Cybersex (ŠUM#12)