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The End of Sex
Published in Chair et Métal, and in rhizome.org - 1999
"Today I think the alien is inside."--William Gibson
Reading the already vast literature that is currently accumulating on the Internet and the technological revolution is like leafing through a panic-stricken Bible: on the one hand, there are apocalyptic and paranoid prophets; on the other, witnesses (martyrs) announce a promised land of rhizomatic hyper-icons and the beatitudes of technology. William Gibson himself, who coined the term "cyberspace," is perfectly content to extrapolate our present technological fictions pessimisticallHowever, the worldwide expansion of the digital realm should not lead to a simplistic utopianism, nor to a dystopia of anti-technological depression. The third position of neutral observer is also denied us: we do not have the luxury of not thinking about what already affects us all today.
The technology of the Internet confirms Ferdinand de Saussure's discovery that language, taken on the level of signifiers, is only a series of relative and negative differentials, which can be written minimally as [0,1]: from the outset language was already digital. Those two basic elements can, inside every computer, be combined into
algorithms to create text, calculate the trajectory of atomic bombs, manage stock portfolios, in brief create a world. This world is a reality that imposes itself; it is not a virtual double of "true reality," as some think, but is, in fact, a continual prolongation of what we have always termed cosmos, i.e. the linguistic fiction of our perceptions (which creates the consistent imaginary of what we term "human life"). As such, nothing new, if not an almost infinite dilation of reality and its simulacra that sustain us. The debates about virtual reality are thus, at this level, false. Our world has always been virtual, from the moment man began to speak.
To call this a liberation (which is the beatitude discourse) is to fall into the trap of being blinded by the Law: beneath the infinitely increasing Imaginary, works the hard and fast rule of the binary materiality of language. The Internet is the maximum extension of the idolatry of the signifier, of objects, of representations. The feeble credo of our Entertainment Society (Société du Spectacle) is thus exposed, but cut from the desire of the people of antiquity. (Freud: "The ancients stressed the symbolic drive; moderns emphasize the object:" consequently, the progression of civilization is only a reinforcement of repression.) In the Internet, the figure of the self already reigns as master, we do not cease to project ourselves upon it and identify ourselves with it, finding our ego dilated to cosmic dimensions.
In this way, the Internet does not constitute an epistemological break. For it to be or to become one (I won't make any predictions one way or the other), the computer would have to have produced a homonym, as did Kepler with the ellipsis (using the same word but not the same reality as Ptolemy's circle/cosmos). The Internet, in the explosion of the past few months, is not the bypassing of Galilean or Cartesian science, a jump into postmodernity, but it is the intensification of seventeenth century's modernity.
Underneath the images, it is not the beatitude of fractured, composite cyberspace"identities" that gives existence to the Internet. Rather, it is the ideal of modern science that controls it and allows its existence.
The most serious problem resides therein, noted solely by Sherry Turkle of MIT (Life on the Screen). It is known that modern science abolishes the subject, a repression that is not its goal but only a foreseeable consequence of its universal extension. Bluntly put, the sexual lives of Einstein and Galileo matter little; what matters is that their algorithms work, outside of their status as desiring subjects (e.g. for medicine to be effective, the body must be reduced to the mechanical). Science is therefore against sex, as far as sex defines the subject; it is against the incarnate symbolic subject; it functions thus unbeknownst to us, as a vast enterprise of disincarnation, tearing apart the contingency of the desiring body, promoting the erasure of unconscious identity; in brief, modern science is the most powerful and most fundamental figure of repression; the [0,1] tears our bodies apart, making them disappear in digital images. Thus its expansion provokes hedonistic regressions, refuge in the imaginary of ethnic, tribal, sexual identities instead of submission to rationality. Digital science incessantly engenders unreal resistance,symptoms of a continually more profound alienation. And to its progression is attached an increase in almost barbaric violence.
To avoid misunderstandings, I am neither old-fashioned nor puritanical; we need both more science (technology) and more sex. More science and technology are needed to cure, to produce more and to do so more economically, to treat environmental diseases at a viable cost; more sex because the expansion of [0,1] threatens our alterity, to the point that we can already see dangerous times ahead of us. The Other will disappear entirely, absorbed by the self of the machine; we will live eternally, biomechanical entities separated from procreation, communicating our imaginaries through little electronic thrills. This creates for us an irresolvable paradox: we cannot go back to the pre-Galilean world, but the infinite universe, created in man's mind in the Seventeenth Century which has now acquired a prodigious extension, has no place for us. We struggle for desire because the manipulative power of mathematical letters and algorithms kills the subject's desire and forces us into a placeless dereliction.
To understand what I mean it let us look at MUD rooms ("multiple user dungeons" from the Dungeons and Dragons game). The subjects discussed in MUD rooms represent a convergence of interests. This could be stock actions (especially on the Internet), matchbox collections, or sex.
Enter a MUD room, change your gender, construct the seductive character that you are not in real life. From the reception room pass into a private room with your partner. Caress, climax electronically. At first, you will experiment a fantastic liberation; your body is now in parentheses and you can finally put your fantasies into practice. But you feel a nagging suspicion: having left your body, the very contingency that signifies your identity, aren't you submitted to yet another stripping? Don't you see that you are still subjected to the most explicitly and brutal form of the law which forces your body into a constraining parade of signifiers? Love through words, and doubtless soon through images of the body, is not at all a liberation, a jump into ethereal space where desire is granted without limits; it is a surrender to our repressions (because outside of cyberspace we also make love to signifiers through signifiers); our simplest gestures are thus determined by the inescapable law of language.Freud already warned us that nothing is more repulsive to a narcissistic fantasy than another's narcissistic fantasy. Love and jouissance on the Internet are nothing but the maximum extension of the alienation of desire in objects (and first and foremost in words); it is not the liberation of desire, but the false liberty of projections and identifications. Sherry Turkle mentions the case of a 23 year old physics student named Stewart, a lonely neuropath whose only experience of love was a MUD character. His success as "Achilles" the romantic seducer only made the abyss between his real identity and his fantasy more profound. The false cure of the Net caused an even greater dereliction.
Of course having a body, a proper name tied to this body, and a gender made of an irreducible singularity poses all sorts of problems. Thus, why not get rid of these and fabricate another body constructed of words, images, and algorithms (that is, without sex)? But voilà : the signifying singularity will disappear at the same time. It will be entirely absorbed by the fantasy which is only there to repress singularity; the body as image of an individual desire will be abolished, the subject will be thrown into the trash can of digital history. Assuming an identity in a MUD room is not replacing a reality with a non-reality, it just means giving a maximum extension to the non- reality of the imaginary (what we call "life," "reality"). The question of whether the Internet is a reality or not is no longer pertinent, the answer is always affirmative.
Yes, there will be some intercourse, but not of a sexual type when science will have suppressed the contingencies of our bodies (when science will have completed the task of medicine, i.e. to transform us into bionic beings). We will no longer die (sexual relations are already no longer necessary for reproduction); having become immortal and eternal, we will be dead forever as desiring subjects. Copulate? But why? It would be risking exposure to an Other we do not know.At any rate, the common conception that there is no law on the Internet, that we enter a postmodern euphoria through a nonhierarchical diffraction, is a mythological error. The dispersion of viewpoints, the possibility of writing or representing all fantasies, of corresponding with the entire world, and of finding pertinent information on all subjects, corresponds to a maximum expansion of the bit's domination. Under the cover of a false absence of center and hierarchy, the Internet only makes the submission to projections and identifications even more opaque. Fantasy is simply the inverse of the Law. The Internet allows a diffraction of the Law superior to all those known until now. For example, my university conducted a survey (electronically and surreptitiously, of course) on how the network was used by all students, faculty, and administrators. It was discovered that seventy percent of the time spent on the network was devoted to, not scientific, erudite, or bureaucratic exchanges, but to sexually explicit sites! The potential level that technology gives to little academic transgressions in this case corresponds precisely to an extension of the power to survey, to count, and to classify individuals.
The maximal growth of the imaginary on the Internet entails (as it is not recognized often enough) good as well as evil: love as well as hatred. The Internet is where limitless narcissism, source of all evil according to Freud, can be affirmed. The denunciation of tyrants as well as their propaganda, the beatitudes of environmentalists as well as neo- Nazi hatred, Martha Stewart's recipes as well as formulas for privately made atomic bombs can all be found there. The neutrality of the new medium, coupled with its universality, causes a double progression, an infernal spiral dialectic of transgression and repression. If one can learn how to make an atomic bomb on the Internet, then powers of surveillance and limitation must increase proportionally to what subverts them.What about the stock market, then? Anyone with a computer and a minimum of capital can participate in the structural center of advanced capitalism. Here again the subject disappears in the jouissance of surplus value promised by his investments. The Eden of Internet actions, the Internet mutual fund, produces 343% (4.5 times the initial investment) in one year; AOL has a stock value equivalent to the gross national product of New Zealand. All this reminds one of the speculative tulip bubble in seventeenth century Holland. Demand creates demand in an apparently infinite ascending spiral. The traditional criteria of evaluation go out of the window and financial analysts invent new justifications to legitimize the charters' parabolic curves. Euphoria reigns in the Internet culture, a similar jubilation takes hold of investors: a vision -- which could well be realized -- of a limitless commercial future, supported by a universal software code and the market ideology that sustains it grabs them; the consumer, harshly objectified and commodifed by a profile of his most personal tastes, only has to type on a keyboard to see the objects of his desire materialize on his porch, those same objects that were made at minimal cost by remote controlled computers situated at strategic locations. An innumerable mass of intermediaries will become unemployed.
The investment process embraces the very structure of the Internet, with the horizontality of Egyptian incest (between brother and sister): the day traders buy or sell according to the rumors and information they read in chat rooms; these rooms are the exact analogue of the MUD room. But the circularity of the mirror goes even further: first, the traders buy and sell the very companies that create the necessary structure for their stock operations; and then, the same way MUD rooms satisfy the superego's exigency of sexual jouissance, the logic of capital accumulation espouses the superego's imperative of "More! More!," the first commandment of capitalism. Here again the accumulation and the satisfaction of demand correspond to an ever greater alienation of desire. The subject collapses under the merchandise he can afford, in the same way he alienates and abolishes himself in a proliferation of sexual images in MUD rooms.
There is a certain discontent in civilization, which is the result of its ineluctable progression. What should we do, asked Lenin? We should neither deny nor idolize progress but we should try to understand its effects on our desire, remaining vigilant to the new violence this process entails. And, while waiting for the end of sex, we should explore the possibilities of a new human subject. If repression increases continually under the hold of science and technology, it dialectically creates what resists it: a new desire, which is still obscure to us.